| How to Organize Your Child's Room |
| Home Made Easy shows you how to organize your child's room. |
From "Home Made Easy"
episode DHME-104 |
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- You can make clean up a lot more fun by playing the timer game. The timer game pits the clean up time against the clock instead of against the clutter. Set a timer for a few minutes (for however long you think your children can sustain their energy). Have a little reward for them if they finish by the time the timer goes off.
- Encourage your child's creativity, but let them know that clean up is part of the game. Some families teach children to put one item back before they can take out a new toy or book. Others find that setting a clean up time every evening does the trick because their children might build extravagant constructions using wood blocks, highway sets and the cars all at once.
- Drawer bins are great for your children and a simple system to use. A child can take out a
drawer and bring it to where they are playing, and then replace the drawer when they are finished (figure B). Each drawer can be labeled with what is inside. - Avoid big toy boxes because although they are a great catch-all, they are impractical if your child dumps everything out to find the teeny-tiny toys that have sifted to the bottom.
- Divided storage containers are great for storing game pieces (figure C) such as checker pieces, Chinese checker pieces, etc.
- Small individual containers are idea for storing crayons, colored markers and pencils.
- Once your children start school, reams of paper will be coming into the house. This is a good time to teach children about paper management. Help them to sort papers they should keep (best writing, papers they will need for a test, etc.) and encourage them to recycle the rest. Give them a drawer or a desktop holder for hanging files (figure D).You could also make folders for special interests such as cartoons, stickers and art projects At the end of each school year, go through the files and reassess what is important and what is not. Eventually you could get a filing cabinet which you can keep in their room to store awards and certificates, report cards, pictures, school work and cards as they get older.
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