5 Steps to Starting a Toy Rotation

As I mentioned in my last post, in the evenings and on weekends, Emma often has a hard time choosing from her many toys and ends up moving from activity to activity so quickly that it results in a disastrous living room, inability to focus on something for any sustained amount of time, and therefore leaving me unable to get any non-playing tasks completed. That’s where the toy rotation and “Invitations to Play” (or stations) comes in. Today I spent about 45 minutes (while said toddler stared at Dinosaur Train on the laptop) going through all of Emma’s toys in the living room upstairs and creating the beginning to a toy rotation system. Here are the 5 steps that I used and hopefully will lead to happy play time, less clutter, and a calmer mamma 🙂

1. Organize toys into their like parts and put them in labeled, gallon-size, zip lock bags. We had lots of things in bins so this went fairly quickly. Though I do keep finding parts in random places that now need to be added to the bags.

2. Find a storage spot for all of the bags that is out of reach or off limits to the child(ren) and group by toy type. We have a cabinet in Steve’s office that has been used for storing stuff we don’t use. I took out all of that stuff and now have a space for toys (and also now have a full floor of “stuff we don’t use” that I need to go through…)

3. Gather 4-5 baskets, bins, or trays that will serve as your “Invitation to Play” baskets.

4. Choose a spot where the choices or stations will be available. Emma has a toy box in the living room and a play tent that she got for her birthday. I put 1 “station” in the tent, the “doctor” station was already out and set up on a chair, and the others in the toy box (for a total of 5 stations).

5. Explain to your child(ren) the new system and how often the “stations” will change. We are going with rotating morning and afternoon (we’ll see how I actually keep up with that) on weekends and maybe every other day during the week. This is still up in the air for me as I see how Emma responds. Right now she is super into playing “doctor” so that station might stay around every day for awhile.

For the first rotation, I chose a theme (a very broad theme of “Imagination”) to help decide which 5 toys to put out. I also wanted to keep it simple and use things we had. A lot of the ideas on my Pinterest Board require making or acquiring pieces. Hopefully I will be motivated to try out some of these eventually, but for now simple is good and we have PLENTY to choose from. I also think it would be fun to focus library trips on one of the themes to incorporate new books into the stations.

The first attempt went really well. She did combine stations, but played independently, with several prompts and questions about what she was doing for about 40 minutes! When we transitioned from stations to a little afternoon yoga she helped clean up and instead of there being an entire toy box of random parts of toys, we were able to put the different pieces back in their buckets and into the toy box for when I’m ready to switch them out. It’s only day 1, but I am optimistic!

What sorts of themes do you think would work well for toy rotations? What types of “Invitations to Play” do you think your kiddo(s) would be excited about? I would love to hear your ideas, suggestions, and experiences in the comments!