10 Smart Organizing Tools for Getting Kids’ Spaces in Shape

Concerning stifling children's imagination, what really stifles it is when everything is jumbled together so they can't find that one item the need to finish their creation. Having the eyeballs and feathers in separate containers doesn't mean they can't both be pulled out and used together. I've noticed with my children and now grandchildren, young ones like to separate and categorize items. I've seen my grandchildren carefully putting away the old Lincoln Logs, cardboard box fallen apart long ago, with the many single notch pieces in their own separate box that's then put away on the shelf on top of the bigger box holding the rest of the pieces. I've watched one family of grandchildren working together to construct a complicated Lego set with the 11 and 9 year old carefully following the instructions and the 6 year old doing a little bit of construction before joining the 4 year old who has been happily separating like pieces into little piles, making it easier for the builders to find what they need for each step. I've seen granddaughters in another family separate their Barbie accessories into clothing, shoes, dishes, furniture, etc. into small boxes or bags then placed into the larger one labeled Barbie so they can easily find the items they want for imaginative play. In that family, they've learned to, mostly, keep things put away when they're done with them so they can find them when they want them again. Their father was raised in a family where cleanup meant everything got picked up right now and put into whatever box is handy. (Once after a visit from his mother, who had "helped" the kids by cleaning up their toys, one of the kids found a pair of her reading glasses in one box they'd had to dump to reorganize their things.) So if Dad takes over they end up having to dump everything out the next day to get all of the train pieces, play dishes, puzzles pieces, or whatever they want to play with at the moment, which means a bigger job when cleanup time comes. With 6 children in that family, I can only imagine what their crafting sessions would look like if all the craft supplies were jumbled together in the craft cupboard.

This was such a thoughtful piece. I don’t know how many kids organization articles I’ve read that all say the same things. This was creative and I got plenty of new ideas. Thanks!

We are a book heavy family. My kids have tons of books and if they were lined up on a shelf, there would be a 100% chance of them ending up in stacks on the floor as they search through them. We have a book shelf with bins for the books, like one of the people above commented. Toys in the bins below, books in the one above. We aren’t super fancy, but you could dress it up easily I’d imagine. And it’s super functional for how my kids sort through books. Not pictured are the more narrow bins (cheap ones from the dollar section at Target) I have sitting on top that house their early chapter readers as they get into those. As we moved to distance learning, this kind of gave them the home library feel when they went to get books for independent reading.