As Sophia is growing, so is her collection of toys. I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that she’s losing interest in them despite them being age appropriate. We obviously can’t afford to supply a constant stream of new and different toys (which I don’t think would teach her good values anyway). I think it’s a case of having too much choice.
So this morning I decided to sort her toys into four piles. I made sure there was a good range in each pile and that each contained at least one ‘favourite’ toy.
I’m going to have a four-week rotating system where each bag will come out on a Sunday and she’ll have a week to play with the toys before they're put away and the next bag comes out. Hopefully only seeing certain toys every four weeks will help her to play a bit more purposefully with them! She’ll have access to her books and toddle truck all the time as I think they’re important.
We store Sophia’s toys on the bottom two shelves of our bookshelf as she can see all the toys and choose which she wants to play with.
The toddle truck holds her books and she enjoys taking them in and out.
I usually use the big bowl to contain her smaller toys, just to keep them neat but from now on I’m going to fill it with small manipulatives. At the moment it contains these small Christmas and animal knitted figures which I was given last Christmas. The kind of things I’ll put in here are things like blocks, small bean bags, giant beads, natural objects such as large pebbles, pine cones, large sticks etc.
To the right of the shelves lives her treasure basket and a bag of library books which she can only look at when supervised (otherwise she’d chew on them!).
I’m hoping that this system will work a bit better for us!
