Organizing Your Kids Books

 Organizing Your Kids Books

You want your kids to be organized. But you need it to be easy and fast and fun! It’s important for children to manage their own things. By giving them responsibility for their toys, clothes, and rooms you teach them essential life skills. This is a broad subject, so we’ll focus on tips you can use to make your life easier and your kid’s toys and books more organized.

10 tips for organizing toys and kids’ books

  1. Store small toys in see-through bins that are an appropriate size for your kids to carry.
  2. Sort items of the same type into bins.
  3. Communicate where things belong with labels.
  4. Use container size as the limit for that type of item.
  5. Apply the one-in-one-out rule to cull the number of toys.
  6. Never keep the box from a toy separate from the toy itself.
  7. Make it easy for preschoolers to put books away by housing them in bins.
  8. Store books for older children on shelves.
  9. Make putting things away as easy as taking them out.
  10. Model the behavior that you want from your children.
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Hope you enjoyed these general tips on organizing toys and your kid’s books. Here are similar posts, with general kid’s organizing tips, and tips for organizing kids’ bedrooms.

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Janet Schiesl

Janet Schiesl

Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.

She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.

Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.

Janet Schiesl

Janet Schiesl

Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.

She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.

Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.

10 Comments

  1. Janet Barclay on June 2, 2019 at 10:19 am

    I hadn’t thought about using some of these methods with young kids, but it makes a lot of sense! If it’s a good system, it will work for most people of any age, and what a great way to get them started on the right foot!

  2. Janet Schiesl on June 2, 2019 at 2:17 pm

    When working with families, the Mom is usually our client, and she often wants to learn how to best manage the family and to teach her children to be more organized.

  3. Gina Weatherup on July 26, 2021 at 8:12 am

    These tips match well with one of the things you’ve posted about separately – don’t do things that the kids can do themselves! If they have the right size containers and know what is supposed to go in them, a lot of kids can put toys and books away (though mine always needed reminding).

    • Janet Schiesl on July 27, 2021 at 8:52 am

      The reminding is definitely Mom’s work, but you are teaching them great life skills.

  4. Seana Turner on July 26, 2021 at 10:35 am

    Putting things away needs to be easy! You are better off with fewer toys than so many that restoring order is difficult. Love clear containers for sure, but keeping the number of toys at bay is the “secret sauce” with children, right? Also agree about separating boxes and contents. Then we just end up with an attic full of boxes LOL!

    • Janet Schiesl on July 27, 2021 at 8:53 am

      Yes. Less is best. I suggest to clients who are hesitant that we box up some toys and see what happens. The Pareto Principle works here. Kids play with 20% of their toys 80% of the time.

  5. Sabrina Quairoli on July 26, 2021 at 12:36 pm

    I love that you mentioned, “model the behavior that you want from your children.” Many parents do not realize that what kids see is more important than what you tell them. Thank you for reminding parents of this to ingrain what behavior they are expecting from them.

    • Janet Schiesl on July 27, 2021 at 8:55 am

      If parents always do things the same way the kids don’t know any different. The behavior just becomes “the way we do it”.

  6. Julie Bestry on July 27, 2021 at 5:33 pm

    So many of these resonate, and I don’t even have kids. All of the big people need to model the behavior we wish to see in the tiny humans!

    “Never keep the box from a toy separate from the toy itself.” leads me to ask, why are we keeping boxes for toys in the first place. Board games? Sure. Puzzles, maybe. But most toys? I’m not sure the boxes do much of anything.

    And yes, preschooler books are better in dishpans, or as you note, books, but not on shelves. They can’t read, so seeing only the spines of books makes them useless. That’s why they pull the books off the shelves in the first place!

    • Janet Schiesl on July 28, 2021 at 8:15 am

      I think people keep the box for the information/pictures on the sides of them. I like to cut up a box if they want to save the information. It makes it much easier to store. Even for games and puzzles. Those boxes are the worst! They don’t take the wear and tear that happens with kids.

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