Toy rotation

[banthebiglight]

Do you do toy rotation or toys out all the time?

We have a small home so my 3 year old just has one Ikea kallax unit with 8 baskets in it. Each basket has a different toy in it: Duplo, magnet tiles, brio trains and tracks etc. he has a toy garage that is the only thing that doesn't fit away into a basket. In his bedroom he only has a bookshelf, a basket of soft toys, and his torch. I find it easier to keep everything tidy this way and my son seems very happy with the set up. He goes to nursery 3 days a week so I feel like he has plenty of variety there and we also have a mud kitchen and swing in the garden as well as his bike and scooter. We spend a lot of time outdoors.

Some friends of ours do toy rotation. Their playrooms are amazing and my son does love a play date at their houses. We don't have space for that, just a kallax unit in the living room. But even so I don't think I'd have the energy for rotating toys.

What's your preference: all the toys always available, or rotate them in and out?

We did informal rotation because main storage wasn't where she played so we brought things out for a while and then swapped them over.

I was similar to you up until the point of having too many toys to fit in the kallax unit. (2 year age gap meant keeping the younger aged toys) so then I started having a box on top of my wardrobe and rotating. It was nice because I split up the things like jigsaws so that it wasn't overwhelming with which one does this belong to.

This may end up being the case. We're only having one child so that might make it easier. I'm thinking that some things will be swapped in a year or two as well. He'll outgrow the Duplo basket and that will become Lego I'm sure. He loves Lego at his friend's house who has an older brother but still puts things in his mouth on occasion so not quite ready for it in our home! At the moment he plays where we see him for the most part but again, in a year or two I'm sure we can put a smaller shelving unit in his bedroom with toys to increase options.

I feel like if we rotated toys he'd forever be asking for the toys that weren't out which would defeat the purpose (and drive me bonkers!) so I prefer to have a minimal selection of toys that are always there and that he can get out by himself.

My living room is a toy bomb site🫣 there's nowhere to put them out of sight that my little one can't just pull them out from 😅

Toys can breed, I swear!

There was a woman on YouTube that I forget the name of who talks about the "container concept". Really stuck with me so we stick by that rule. He has only enough of any toy that fills one basket and no more. Last Christmas he got some more Duplo and that filled the duplo basket so we've kindly asked family not to get any more come Christmas. But he does have space for more brio so he'll be getting 2 or 3 trains for Christmas and a few other things.

I found that mine would play better with you rotation and some short lived novelty of new things being out. It was worth the effort of rotating for me.

Did they not ask for the toys that were hidden away?

I have an 8 unit kallax too. Its enough and i dont really toy rotate as books increase i will have to informally start.

I also declutter regularly just a bit here and there with low cost toys she doesnt play with anymore.

We also have a couple of bulky toys. These have been sold or given away if i feel youngest wont use them.

They will sometimes request something, that's not a problem for me, it means that they actually want to play with it. There's different ways of doing it, I try to wait until they seem to be losing interest in what's out and swap stuff around but it's not rigid. I don't have a particular schedule.

We do some rotation but we don't hide the toys out of rotation, we just move the boxes around on the kallax because the kids can't reach the top rows

I rotate toys. I do it because she gets much more value out of them and it keeps the house tidy too.

I keep a few boxes in the toy area and swap them every few months. I don't rotate her favourite toys or things she is really into at the time. But after a few months of having the tea sets out I swap them for something else. I swap blocks for Duplo, ect.

Every time she says 'oh wow my blocks are back' and starts to play with them again.

@PlumSheep

I suppose because no one tells me which of my beloved things I can use on any given day so why would I do that to my child? One of my friends has a gorgeous play room but she says it's really hard work rotating everything and to me it looks like trying to replicate what a nursery provides. I don't want the hard work and I don't want to stop my son playing with something he wants. He might have an idea to set his farm animals up with his train set and I then stilt his imagination saying "sorry, farm animals aren't available this month"

I get the principle of it as I don't want hundreds of toys tipped everywhere either, but have chosen to avoid that by keeping toys to a minimum and manageable. So all toys are well loved and always available at any time. I think if my parents had hidden any of my toys away as a child I would have been quite upset. Perhaps some children are not so fussed by that.

We have a small house and two Trofast units of toys in our toddler's room. There is a big plastic bucket (big enough to get in) in the lounge and we bring a selection of her toys down and store them in there then rotate every few days to two weeks depending on how much she's enjoying the ones that are out.