Toy Bins & Baskets

Encouraging your child to self engage herself in play can be challenging. As much as we all love to play with our children, there comes a moment in a day when they need to play on their own, so work around the home can be done. Self-directed play is a great way for your child to engage his own creative juices. However, it can be difficult for your child to have the attention span to accomplish this if their environment is one of a cluttered disorganized mess of toys and games. If you can’t find all the pieces to a set of blocks within a minute in the giant toy box, how do you expect your child to do so? If you can’t find all of the doll’s clothes, how is your child going to do so? In order to encourage more self engagement and creative free play in your child, you need to set up the right environment and the right structure from which your child can play like a monkey in a tree swinging from limb to limb without falling.

Think of the playroom or bedroom – wherever you keep the majority of the toys, puzzles and games – as the trunk of your play tree. All of the toys are the leaves, but your tree needs something to hang all of those leaves on in order for your monkey to climb up to those leaves to play with them. You need tree trunks. How do you get tree trunks? You do the hard work, once in awhile, of sorting and organizing all of those toys into similarly grouped items of play and store them in bins or baskets, creating a system of play. At the same time, when you are actively playing with your child, encourage them to pick up and put away the toys they are finished with before they move on to the next bin or group of toys. Hopefully, this will carry over, eventually, into becoming a habit for your child when they are playing on their own without you as well. How does this monkey in a tree system work? Let’s explain it out in detail.

Go through your child’s toys and sort them accordingly. Then, you can create a few play stations areas or activity areas and the rest of the toys can be in bins and baskets grouped according to type of play or toy. For example, create a pretend dress up area with several or one bin of dress up clothes and accessories. Create an arts and crafts area that includes a small table and chairs that are child sized. Next to it, set up a storage rack with different kinds of arts and crafts materials for your child to explore their artistic side with. This works better with older children. Younger ones, you would have to be monitoring this kind of free play more closely. Paintbrushes and paints can go in one bin. Crayons and markers together or separate. Colored paper, scratch paper that you maybe was going to recycle anyway, and notebooks or coloring books can be in a bin or separate bins. Keep some fun themed stencils on hand as well as sponges cut out in shapes. Stamps and stamping inks. Really the possibilities are endless.

Other play station ideas would include a train station, a kitchen play station, a doll house station, a Lego station, a reading station or a puzzle station. You don’t have to do all of these stations, but some can just naturally develop based off of the toys you already have. By organizing all of the Legos either into one bin or if you have a large collection of Legos, into multiple bins sorted according to color or shape of Lego, you are finding for them all the branches they need to climb to fun experiences. The key is to encourage them to pick up afterwards. Let’s say they have a play barn with farm animals. They have been playing with it and then decide they want to play a game. Encourage them to put the barn back on the shelf and put all the small pieces that go with it in a small basket that is placed next to the barn. Then, they can get the game down from the shelf. Your kids may protest to the pick up aspect of this scenario, but ultimately, they benefit in the long run if they do this. Hours of fun play are in store for them when they can easily find the toys that lead to inspirational and creative play. If they can readily see a bin of blocks, they are going to want to play with them as opposed to seeing one block in a pile of other toys.

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