Do your kids have too many toys in their play area? Are they bored and overwhelmed? Is the play area often a mess and stressful to tidy? The solution at my house is doing a toy rotation every few weeks. I rotate the toys in my children’s bedroom and playroom storing toys out of their sight in our basement. They are never sad about toys leaving because they are so excited to have toys back that they haven’t played with in several weeks or even months.
Sometimes I choose a theme when I rotate and try to put toys into the play area that fit into the theme and sometimes I do not. The thing I enjoy about rotating toys is that it’s almost like Christmas time for my kids. I love the excitement they feel over old toys seeming new again. Clean-up time isn’t as overwhelming because they don’t have everything they own out at once. I also feel like our toys get more use when they are rotated because even though they may be stored away for several weeks or months, when they do come back out they get lots of use.
Another great thing about doing ongoing toy rotations is that it’s an easy time to weed out the toys that are broken, missing pieces, no longer age appropriate or no longer enjoyed. It’s also a time to be generous and get the children involved with donating toys. When I tell my children that there are other boys and girls who don’t have toys to play with, they feel compassion and are willing help fill bags with their toys to give away. I often have an ongoing donation bag going and then when it’s full, we drop it off. It’s a win, win, win situation. My children learn to be generous and feel compassion for others, we get more space and someone else gets to enjoy our once treasured toys.
When I was teaching preschool outside the home, I did toy rotations by swapping toys with other preschool, Young Fives and Kindergarten classrooms in our building. We often swapped large pretend play pieces as well as bins of manipulative toys (stringing beads, lacing cards, puzzles, blocks, etc) and children’s books to keep the children from getting bored with the same stuff.
3 comments:
This is such a good idea... I need to employ it, but haven't yet. Thanks for reminding me.
This might be a dumb question, but how did you introduce this concept? I don't think mine would understand if I told them other kids don't have toys to play with. We have worked on sharing and she's OK with that - although I don't know if she just does it to avoid conflict or if she really wants the other one to have a toy to play with.
What a great blog you have here!
Darn, I hit the wrong key on that last post and didn't put my name.
Joyce
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