So I've posted before about how my kids all constantly dump EVERYTHING. They do play with it, but its always a matter of pulling everything out for the game they've made up. Today its the trash game. They work for the trash company & dumped all the toys in the floor & are pretending to wash them in the toy kitchen sink. Wouldn't be an issue except that every day it is literally 45 minutes of me saying, "Help clean up...Nothing else comes out until its clean...etc" And everything is neatly organized on shelves, but they can't ever remember where it goes w/o asking me. And so we waste much of our day & i end up doing most of the work anyway. Today I decided to try a new strategy.
I took out the shelving units & moved in a toy box. I took out the toys that have many pieces like blocks & moved them into a shelving unit in the living room. The living room will be our space to sit and play with activities. The playroom will be a dump & play room. All toys can be picked up & dumped back into the no when they're done. Exceptions will be the play food for the kitchen set, trains for train table, & dress up clothes that hang on the wall. They actually cleaned up their mess on their own & in record time today. I guess I can compromise with the toy box for now. When they get better about clean up we may try the orderly shelves again. In the meantime we will practice our orderly skills during living room play. Wish us luck!

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Hooray! I'm glad you found something that seems to work. My toys are all out in the open, accessible all the time for the dck's. I rotate things with a lot of pieces and the things with pieces go into open container bins. Very easy to clean. Puzzle pieces, play food & dishes, little people stuff, dinosaurs, puppets, etc.

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I used to do the same thing when my provider friend who I was visiting did the toy box and her kiddies cleaned up great. She used those plastic milk crates and would stack them in the garage in a wardrobe type cupboard (so they wouldn't get dirty/dusty). Then she'd bring out a crate at a time. When they got tired of one crate then she'd get out another. I started doing the same thing but I stacked mine in a bedroom closet. A larger closet with the bifold doors. Things like legos and hotwheels and blocks went on a shelf but I only had one bookcase type shelf. Mostly I used the milk crate 'toy boxes'. I liked the crates better than a larger toy box because it didn't hold as many toys and things didn't get lost in a huge box. They could even dump the whole thing out and it wasn't really that many toys. Like you, I also had the toy kitchen and had the kitchen stuff in a box next to it. When we did things like dress up, I'd just bring in a large plastic storage box full of clothes.

I had to fight the current mindset that everything must go on a shelf. Why? It is the current trend but many a child (like me) has grown up with a toy box and we survived. I found it to be much more calming than expecting the children to remember where everything went and the little ones dumping them. If I had a lot of 'dumpers' I'd also put less toys in each bin on the shelf. I also put bins for the older children up on the top shelf where the little ones couldn't reach.

As an aside, I also had a plan for books because they would constantly get pulled out and be all over the floor without being looked at. Finally, I just would bring out about 2 books times the number of children I had and that was the daily allotment until they got bored with them and then I'd get another few out.

I simply couldn't stand constantly being 'on' the children to put each thing away. That was stressful. Who wants to be nagged? That's what it felt like to me anyway. I tried to make the enviornment (sp?) fit their needs and my personality. You know what feels right to you and what makes your day more joyful.

Laurel

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I put bigger things like play telephones .little people vehicles and abox of little people and box of carson open shelves.Everything else in plastic totes.We took a big tote at a time then put away before opening more.

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