Legos and Bare Feet in the Night: kid-driven toy clean up

We are finally on the down-hill slide with toys. It has been a long 15 years of noise making, light flashing, mess making toys. With everyone getting bigger we are finally starting to transition away from the little plastic play things and we are seeing more footballs, roller blades, and bicycles. We used to have enough toys to keep a complete set on 'rotation' in the cupboards in the garage. I no longer have a Toys R Us hiding in my garage cupboards. But, we still have our fair share of toys left in the toy room .

One of my least favorite parts of the natural way kids play is what I call the 'tossed salad.' No matter how many kids, no matter their ages, no matter the training, the toys all manage to intermingle and become a disorganized mess. There are always pieces from a board game, legos from another room, chess pieces, a couple of random playing cards, action figures, hot wheels tracks, you name it, it's mixed together into the same bin (or in the middle of the floor).

Over the years I have figured out it is not worth the effort of hounding people all day everyday to put things away 'where they belong' when it comes to little toys. It's like an evil Easter egg hunt and it just kills the fun of playing with the toys to begin with. True creative play should involve dinosaurs driving cars, a block maze for ping pong balls to be rolled through, Lego creations that take several days to create, and hand made board games that required the dice and pieces of other games to count spaces moved. Play just isn't as fun if you can't get out of the figurative and literal 'toy box.'

So, we do require the toy room and game room to be tidy. But real toy organization only happens every two weeks. I have found this allows enough time for the creative play they need while not allowing things to get too far out of hand.

This is more clean than usual... But this would be 'tidy'. Even on a great day like this when it appears they have put everything away:

Cars in the dinosaur drawer, pretend kitchen toys in the animal drawer, blocks in the tool toy drawer...

Pencils, crayons, and other supplies mixed together, card games mixed together, board game pieces out of their boxes...

So, step one in our kid-driven toy clean up is simply 'tidy.' This would be different in every home but for us it basically means nothing on the floor, toys generally in the right place (hot wheels tracks cannot remain on the stair handrail), projects on the tables in a semi-orderly fashion, etc. This is probably where most families are. But at least once every other week we make sure the toys actually get put away. And mom does NOT do this part of the job.

The secret to this is in every preschool I have ever seen and it is so simple: pictures. I simply take pictures of how each compartment needs to look to have the toys actually put away. I laminate the pictures so they are sturdy and easy to keep track of. When I announce it is time to clean up and organize the toys, the boys can simply go and do it. They look at the laminated cards for each cupboard or drawer and they make it match.

The contents of each drawer are pictured.

I was lucky enough to be able to size the laminated cards so that they slide into the handle grip of the drawers keeping them visible without being permanent.

It took a small amount of teaching to show them they actually need to open each drawer and check the contents inside. And my part of this training was to hold them to the standard I expected later (it was so tempting to grab the one or two things they missed the first few times). But organization has become independent.

The open cubbies also have pictures of the expected organization for clean up day. These cards just sit inside the left corner of each cubby.

Most days they get close. On clean up day the kids make sure all the pieces are returned to the correct boxes and the card games are complete.

The magical and beautiful side effect of this every-two-week exercise is: they are actually starting to realize everything has a 'real' place. And since they are the ones who have to put everything back in the end, I have started hearing things like, "Put it back where it goes so we don't have to do it later." Ha! Point for Mom!