Remember back to when your little ones were babies and for the first few months you had a beautiful curated collection of toys that sat ready and waiting for your little one to play with they started to grow?
And then bam, before you knew it, multiple birthdays & Christmases had passed, and toys started taking over various spaces in your house. If you are like us and love the minimalistic lifestyle, this does start to mess with your OCD a little!
Not only that, but we also noticed that our children would be overwhelmed with too many toys lying around which meant a lot of stuff wouldn’t get played with as they always had their go-to toys.
So one thing we did was start to regularly rotate our toys by doing the following:
- Grabbing all toys and compiling them in one place to further sort
- Sort all toys into those that can be:
- Kept
- Binned – this is a great time to check for toys that are broken or should have never snuck their way in permanently ie those damn party bag toys
- Passed on or sold – your child has simply grown out of them but they’ve still got good life left in them!
- Out of the ones that can be kept, we then sorted them into piles of what they are ie:
- Books
- Pretend Play Toys ie. dolls, kitchen item, toy tools
- Arts & Crafts
- Motion Toys ie. train sets, toy cars
- Games
- Puzzles
- Soft Toys
- We’d then take a selection of toys from each of the above groups, ie. your child doesn’t need 20 books or 8 soft toys left out as it’s likely they’ll just gravitate to a few. Consider what toys can also encourage cross-play ie tea sets with the dolls, or cross-learning ie. your little one might love their dinosaur puzzle at the moment, so it’s a great idea to leave out any other dino related items like books or soft toys also.
From there we just tucked away the toys that we weren’t leaving out and then rotated them out on a regular basis. A wee hint also, sorting toys is easier done in nap times without the help of little hands and the toys that you are putting away for the moment need to be well hidden from prying eyes!
It’s also worthwhile to consider how you store your toys, where we could we’d leave the toys on display or easily accessible for little ones. It’s also useful to have some storage bins or bags for smaller items like magnetic tiles or building blocks, storage bags like the Play & Go bags are perfect for this sort of use as they can be opened up and used as a play mat and then swiftly closed up scooping all the contents back inside!
The whole goal for Toy Rotation is to keep things fresh and your little one engaged with what they are playing with, if there is a favourite book that is read every night or a toy that is played with on the daily like the reports that we have from customers with our Connetix Tiles, there’s not need to tuck these away to entice any more interest!
