Storing Children's Toys

Janet Schiesl: Hi, I am Janet Schiesl from Basic Organization and I am talking about organizing toys today. Now that you have sorted everything into zones, I would like to talk about storage. If you want your children to put your toys away, you need to give them some place to put them. So I would like to discuss a few options. One option is a toy box and it is a great idea if you want a few toys in a nicer area of your home. One, a toy box holds large objects that maybe hard to store in another capacity. Also, it is very easy for children to quickly pick up toys and just throw them in a toy box. You can close the lid and just store it away, you don't see them. A second method is plastic bins which I recommend to people for a lot of storage. They are inexpensive, they come with lids and they come in all different sizes. So you can buy an appropriate size bin for the amount of toys of that kind. So you might use those for building blocks or Barbies or whatever. You don't have to spend money on them. So you could also use items like a shoe-box or a plastic coffee can for very small items, but any kind of storage works. If you want to your children to put the stuff away, you really have to give them a place to put it. Also, I suggest you use shelving. It just makes it easier for your children to get to the items they are looking for, they can see what they want and they can reach for it. I do caution that if you have shelving that's tall, you need to bolt it to the wall because you don't want the shelving to fall in on a child that's trying to reach something up high. Also, consider the vertical space in your room. Hang bulletin boards or hooks and your children can hang their artwork or something they've done up high. It will decorate the room and they can see their work. You also need to make the storage easy to use. Don't buy bins that are too large for the size of your child. You want them to be able to pick them up and carry them across the room or to the location where they want to play. If it has a lid on top, they are less likely to spill the contents. Also, I suggest to you that you get down on the floor, see from their level what they are looking at and what they can do at their age. Also, teach them how to put their toys away at this point when they have a bin or something to put the things in, you need to show them how to do it. Make it fun, make cleaning up something that you all do, everybody can take one bin and then they can concentrate on that one item that they are picking up in the room while you were maybe concentrating on another item. As an example, you would say, you pick up the Hot Wheels cars and I will pick up the Barbies. They can concentrate on filling that one bin and then the job is done much faster and it is much easier for a younger child. Now that you have got your toys stored, we are going to talk about labelling.