Do you rotate the toys?

[Spring Lily]

I started a thread over in the home forum and wanted to post a link here. I wasn't sure which place to post it.

How many toys do you have out for your kids to play with at any one time? How many toys is enough, what is too much? Are you wading through toys like me and what are you doing about it?

The question is, how many toys do you leave accessible?

Thanks!

[journeymom]

Full disclosure: my kids are 11 y.o. and 15 y.o.   The 11 y.o. still play with toys but less and less so.

To answer your thread title, do (did) I rotate toys?   I did, but only accidentally or indirectly. Never with the intention of pulling them out later in some organized fashion.  We'd get to the point of wading through toys and I go on a decluttering spree and pack toys up in the appropriate bins and boxes and tuck them away in the closet and under the bed.  The we'd forget about them for a while. Then dc would get curious and start pulling things out and 'discover' them all over again.  And the mess would accumulate all over again. 

Obviously organization is one of my weak spots.

But definitely, rotating toys in and out of use works well.  What really helps is if Mom keeps an eye on the toys/projects and helps get them put away at least daily.

[AllisonR]

Way to many. You know the expression a fish always grows to the size of it's fish bowl. My kids are 4 and 6 and they have toys everywhere - family room, their corned off art room, the computer area.... When it gets to be a total war zone I deep clean, with them helping with more concrete tasks. 

I still rotate though - for "stale" items and items with 5 billion parts. So legos, train sets, marble runs.... count as toys with a billion parts. So my general rule is if they want to play with the marble run, then they have to put away the legos first. Stale items are toys they don't play much with, but I think they might. So they go up into the attic and every few months I then swap them out with other stuff that has become stale. If an item that comes back out still isn't played with, then I put it in the recycle pile for someone else to have. 

[crunchy_mommy]

I don't rotate so much as rearrange. Technically all the toys are always accessible... but he most often plays in the living room, and that's where we generally keep his newer/favorite toys. Sometimes we move toys up to the playroom or into the toy chest in there (which he doesn't access on a daily basis) but rarely do toys come back down to the living room once they leave... probably because we keep getting excesssive amounts of toys as gifts so there is no need to really rotate... anything that isn't played with or is not in line with our preferences/values goes straight into the sell/donate pile. I am not into the idea of storing toys to pull them out a week/month/months in the future (too much work/planning for me!), but I do think moving them around & reorganizing his play spaces gives him a similarly 'fresh' perspective.

[ssh]

Originally Posted by crunchy_mommy 

I don't rotate so much as rearrange. Technically all the toys are always accessible...
 

We do this too. We have a spare bedroom that has the extra TV, a twin bed and extra toys. Things go in the spare bedroom when they aren't being played with. DD 'discovers' the toys she hasn't played with in a while and drags them back out. Then other things she's not playing with go in the spare bedroom. Some stuffed animals kinda live there, but most of the other toys are there when she's playing with other stuff. Since DD can go in and play in the spare bedroom the toys aren't ever really inaccessible, but I do rotate things and put them out of her main play areas when she tires of them.  She has some toys that she only pulls out every other month or so, but when she pulls the toy out she plays with it all the time for days or weeks. For example she'll ignore her baby dolls for weeks and then suddenly want to bring them everywhere with her,  use all their beds and strollers, dress them and sleep with them. After a week or two she'll start ignoring them again and be fascinated with her wooden castle and dragons, knights, and princesses ........ or something else.

We really have way too much stuff. My DD has toys that used to be my DH's (star wars, star trek and Jurassic park toys). My MIL likes shopping for bargains and finds a lot of stuff and my DH's grandmother used to like shopping garage sales. Their feelings are more important to us as a family than having too many toys or books, so we keep everything that DD wants to play with.

[2lilsweetfoxes]

Probably over half my kids' toys are in boxes in the garage.  I planned to do the whole rotation thing.  However, between having 3 kids, all at different developmental levels, and grandparents sending stuff a lot, the toys-in-the-house have taken over and I've never been organized enough to do the rotation thing.  Honestly, I could just bring some of those toys in, since they've been locked up for over 3 years--and it would be like Christmas.

[ASusan]

DS is 3, and I've rotated since we moved here when he was just 13 months.

Basically, about every 2-3 months, I pack up a large Sam's Club sized diaper-box of toys from his (small) playroom and take them to the basement. I might scruffle through the old boxes and bring up a few old ones. He always plays more with the ones that I bring up. Once he was out of diapers, this process slowed, as we had no more empty boxes on a regular basis. I did a huge purge between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we're down to about 2 diaper-boxes of 'rotation toys' in storage. Plus way too many containers of Lincoln Logs. not sure how we acquired so many of those.

The play room has a 3-tiered bookshelf, about 4.5 feet wide. I keep most of his toys in bins on these shelves, plus half a shelf of books (which get rotated, too). Very little of it is on the floor.

So, about 8 bins plus 2 storage boxes is where we are at the moment. He saw much of the most recent process, and played with things that I was sorting in the basement. I kept out the things that seemed to interest him the most. Prior to that time, I would do the culling and replacing when he wasn't around. I'm glad to gradually involve him, as he will someday have to be helping make these decisions.

And, this doesn't include garage-outdoor toys, which includes: tricycle, lawnmower, basketball hoop and ball(s), golf clubs and balls, racquets and balls...urgh. Those seem to only multiply!

[VisionaryMom]

I don't rotate toys. That just adds more projects to my list. We have a set amount of space, and that's where toys go. We have one large hutch that houses board games, Legos, and puzzles. We have an arts & education shelf that has an array of art/craft supplies and some workbooks. They also have spaces in their room for toys.

[Agatha_Ann]

Yes! I am a daycare though, so my toy situation might be a little different, but it holds true for my own kids as well.

Toys that are special and they do not want to share with anyone live in their bedrooms and come out in the evenings or on weekends. All the other toys stay in the daycare which is about 1000 sqft in the downstairs of my house. It is basically two playrooms, one is carpeted and has toys that are quieter, books, sorting boards, baby dolls, soft balls, etc The other room is like an indoor playground and it has slides and climbers, a kitchen and tool bench, a ball pit, riding toys, and a bounce house.

I rotate the toys based on the kids interests in them. I have a big walk-in closet that stores all my smaller toys that are not currently out in rubbermaid bins. The kids will ask to get out different bins and I'll get out a few at a time each day. Right now we have out the farm, the potato heads, and dinosaurs. So these toys are always available, but out when requested.

The big playroom is rotated with interest and the weather! The slides will go back outside in the summer and the water table will come out. The bigger toys are stored in the shed outside.

I also have swings, bouncers, saucers, etc that get rotated around depending on if I have any babies!

We have an insane amount of toys...even for a daycare...but we hardly have any conflicts, we even have a two hour playgroup here once a week which totals almost 30 kids in my house and we never have a fight! This is what I remind myself each and every night when I spend hours cleaning lol!

[kanga1622]

We do rotate. DS got a few toys for Christmas and we realized that they would no longer fit in his toy box in our living room (really a laundry basket since he liked that better). So we loaded up anything that wouldn't fit and put it in a laundry basket in the guest room. Every couple of weeks we switch out some of the toys but leave the ones with more play value. His blocks and some books are always available but we switch out which books he has. We also rotate some of his stuffed things and which sets of cars he has access to.

He is currently pulling up and trying to walk so he's most fascinated with his stand up toys but still plays with his other things when they come out of storage. He was thrilled the other day when he found his toys in the guest room so we switched them out with the ones we hadn't seen out on the floor lately.

[pianojazzgirl]

I also "rearrange" rather than rotate.  Right now there are a couple of things going on in our house.  Upstairs in the playroom (out of reach of visiting babies and toddlers) is a big play table inhabited by their Playmobil "world".  Downstairs we keep a collection of "all ages" toys (an IKEA toy shelf with 3 bins that contain balls, animals, and train tracks/trains), one small bin of baby toys (for my best friend's baby to play with when they come over which is pretty much every other day), and some puzzles and games. 

Other, not-very-often-used toys are kept in bins in the playroom and in their rooms.  We also have toys that I keep out of reach and just bring down for them to play with - mostly because of the "billion tiny pieces" factor, or a mess factor - things like Lego, face paints, messier craft supplies, certain games.

Every once in a while toys that were downstairs migrate upstairs and vice versa.  For ex. the trains and tracks were kept upstairs in a bag (kids weren't interested in them) until Christmas when my mom gave ds some new (cool) tracks that kind of re-ignited their interest.  So I switched out some toy cars that were in one of the downstairs toy bins with the trains.  I also take into consideration the kids who visit often.  My best friend's baby has started crawling and pulling up.  That's why we moved the Playmobil upstairs (out of her reach), and I brought a bunch of old baby toys to keep downstairs, now that she's old enough to want to crawl around and play with toys.