Organising for Play, Not just for Tidiness...
How I organise the kids' zones at events can be transferred into your playroom at home!
I have been 'enabling the environment' in schools and nurseries as a teacher, and then as a nanny for the last 11 years. 5 years ago, I started organising homes and nursery storage spaces as a Professional Family Organiser alongside supporting part-time nanny families. With three degrees in Education and a passion for supporting children to learn, I also ended up creating kids' zones in huge shows at the Excel and Olympia.
Below are five ways that do help keep your playroom tidy but ultimately support development.
The Areas of Learning
There are many areas of learning that can be evident in a well-organised playroom. From construction areas for fine motor skills, using small world toys such as cars for colour sorting or counting, adding in reading and writing opportunities to role play and books for understanding the world (geography, history, science) and so much more.
Tidiness
The trick to keeping it tidy is to not have everything accessible all of the time. Rotation of resources is how nurseries and schools manage all of the toys but the key here is to swap like for like. I had one client in a small flat who swapped the toy piano for the car garage, but these are two different development areas.
Try and swap the car garage for the train track and the toy piano for the toy guitar, for example. Too many toys causes overwhelm, your child might say they feel bored and say they having nothing to play with, but in reality, there is too much choice. Think Blockbuster as a teenager!
Themes
We follow something called 'child-led' learning in schools and nurseries, where we follow their interests to support them to learn. They are more excited when they are intrinsically motivated, but this can also help with tidying up! Instead of having one box of jigsaws, that gets really messy really quickly, set up lots of different development areas in one box. For example, a dinosaur jigsaw, small world dinosaurs, dinosaur colouring sheets, a non-fiction and fiction book on dinosaurs and sorting/counting dinosaurs all in one box is easier to tidy up but also, will have them playing for longer autonomously.
Colour coordination
While colour coordination can be dismissed as just something that looks pretty, it actually can do something amazing to the nervous system, as a visually predictable arrangement looks more inviting. More than that, it empowers your child as they know the colour of their favourite book and where to put it back.
In terms of lego, it takes away the process fatigue of trying to find a specific piece and lets your children be more creative.
Labelling
Again empowering your child, with pictures as well as words means they are using their space independently. For our really little ones, you are also giving them a head start on linking the words, letters and sounds so when they do start to read, they have already some exposure.
If you want to learn how to bring learning to life in your playroom,
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