Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Child's Play




Call me crazy but I love to help organize kid's spaces! It's nice to play a small part in helping a child build good habits for keeping their space organized.

The National Association of Professional Organizers has some good tips for getting started in organizing the children's areas of your home:

1. Have bins and boxes on lower shelves so that a child can put away the toys. Have the child label the bins and boxes.
2. Provide low hooks to hang up sweaters, pajamas, jackets, book bags, etc.
3. Take children with you when you go to donate unused items. This helps them learn to part with things.
4. Encourage your child/teenager to choose their outfits for the next day before they go to bed at night.

Here are a couple of other tips to help your kids out:

1. Let them draw fun pictures to label drawers and bins. For younger children, you can take photographs and place them on bins.
2. As birthdays approach, give kids the chance to thin outgrown toys. They might surprise you.

Target has a great storage organizer perfect for corralling all of those Legos, dolls, blocks, dinosaurs and other tiny parts. Simply go to http://www.target.com/ and type in "Storage Organizer Natural" in the search field. The bins are bright green, red and two shades of blue. There is also a really cute option the girls would love with bins in shades of pink and lavender.

Have fun kids!

2 comments:

Emily Korff, Veralana Photography said...

These are great ideas! My kids do really well with giving away toys they've outgrown. One of our big issues is finding all of the parts to older toys so we can give them away as a complete package.

Lauri Mennel said...

It does feel nice to have a complete set of whatever toy or game you are donating. What I try to remember, though, is that children are incredibly creative and even an incomplete set could possibly give another child lots of fun play time. You never know what they'll come up with playing with those games or toys that might be missing one or two pieces!