calling on all your wonderful experience for a 5 yr olds toy problems!!!

[trinityrocks]

well, it's my problem lol but I think she would benifit greatly from being able to find her toys for a start and then being able to tidy them away easily aswell, with help from mummy obviously
Could I have all your experience and fab suggestions as to how I could combat the huge mountain of toys,whats the best way to organise a wide range of different toys and how do I keep it tidied and how much should she help with????

ikea`s tall storage pine unit with different coloured drawers and sizes are brill as they dont take up much floor space but are about 2m high and can bracket together if you want more

please help me, I just went into dd1's room and it's like i've just seen the amount of toys she has for the first time, I am truly shocked and upset, I can't beleive that I have done this to her. No wonder she doesn't play with hardly anything and doesn't respect most of her toys and always asks for more. I have totally spoilt her, the amount she has is obscene, ok please help how do I get rid of tons, do I ask her to help??????? do I do it without telling her, If she helps how do I persuade her o give some up????? HELP

I'd say you have several options, either make different boxes with the toys and only leave one box at a time in her bedroom and introduce a rota..

or

go throught them with her and throw away the broken ones and ask her which one she would like to give to poor children. if they are anything like my DS school they talked to them a lot about the children after the tidal waves etc... and my DS is v. aware that some of his toys would make some other little boy v. v. happy. so make her choose which ones and take them to charity shop with her. Make her feel v. good and v. grown up for giving them away

DS who is 6 has a bedside table with drawers in (he used to have one of those three drawer plastic things on wheels which are also good) for loose small stuff. he then has an under bed drawer for more loose stuff. Finally, games, jigsaws, lego etc are on shelves in his wardrobe and books on a small bookshelf. All from Ikea .

And for the most part, he keeps it tidy himself

BTW, I've also noticed they're much more likely to play with stuff after you've had a good sort out as all the bits that have been scattered around are back together plus they can actually see what they've got!

Mimsie's idea is good re giving toys to charity. You could also suggest if there's something big that she wants that she sells some of the nicer things to make the money for it IYSWIM.

HTH!