Recently I noticed J was barely touching his over flowing box of toys and was getting into all kinds of mischief. Then I read this great article about toy rotation and decided to give it a go. I split all his toys and books into three boxes and put one in the lounge, one in his room and one in our room (to keep him occupied when we want to stay under the duvet for longer on a Saturday morning). Each box contains at least one ball, a soft toy, a shaker or noise maker, something textured and something that is a bit of a puzzle (stacking rings, shape sorter etc) as well as a cloth book, at least one textured book, a book with flaps or similar and a variety of other books. Every couple of weeks I rotate the boxes.
The difference has been huge. Now J loves playing with his toys and can easily see exactly what is in the box without having to pull everything out. He's playing with things that he doesn't usually play with, reading his books more and amusing himself for longer periods of time. It also means I don't end up reading the same couple of books over and over at bedtime!
I also sat and wrote a list of all his toys and split them into categories like the blog suggested. It really did help me to see where J had a lot of similar type toys and was perhaps lacking in other types and has helped to influence what we buy him for Christmas.
While we're on the subject of child's play, we discovered a great game to play on rainy days stuck at home - HOME MADE BOWLING! We grabbed some empty plastic bottles from the recycling pile, set them up in our long narrow kitchen, got a soft ball from J's toy box and began to bowl. J is too little to know how to throw yet but, as I knocked the bottles down and whooped with joy at my achievement, he squealed with excitement and handed me the ball to throw again.
Why not give it a go? :)
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