Photo Source: Organizing Living
We tackled the process for de-cluttering toys in our 4 Easy Steps to Creating and Managing a Toy Outbox, so in this post we’ll take a look at the concept of toy rotation.
The basics- you (or your children) select a specific number of toys for him to play with for a specific period of time.
The details- The moms we feature below all have a slightly different approach so review their strategies and decide what will work best for you (if toy rotation will even work at all).
Kelly from The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking whittled down the children’s toys to four bins which are rotated every day, i.e. they are only allowed to play with one bin in a given day. She started with this technique for managing toys because toys with small pieces weren’t being used and with a larger number of toys available at any given time, her children were just dumping everything on the floor.
Kim from Little Stories rotates toys less frequently (every couple of weeks instead) but limits the number of toys to ten and further categorises toys to thinking, moving and pretending toys and books.
Rachel at Useful Beautiful Home has different plastic baskets for each category labelled with pictures. She does a complete trade every 6 months or so with toys in a bin in another room.
According to Rachel, toy rotation offers newness, limits overcrowding and allows for evaluation of the toys your child is playing with on a regular basis.
We think it’s an interesting way to manage the deluge of toys some parents complain about, you have a pretty good idea about what will fit plus it makes tidy up so much easier!
Do you use toy rotation? If so, what works?
Do you feel like you are denying children their stuff?
Where do you put the ‘extra’ toys?