Notice how I changed from cleaning, to recovering, to digging out? Yeah, well, when it came to the kids' rooms that's exactly what it was-digging.
My kids' rooms are upstairs. I actually don't go up there very often. DH tucks them in at night and they all know how to put their clothes away (except for Explorer, but her room isn't up there). Well, okay, sometimes 'putting away' is equated with 'shoved in general direction,' but they kinda get it. But, the fact is that I don't have a need to go up there much. The storeroom/school supply room is up there and that's pretty much the only reason I go up there.
As you can imagine, kids rooms left unchecked=mass chaos!
I started with Charger's room. His room is the first room at the top of the stairs, it is the smallest, and he is MUCH better and getting rid of things then Mustang.
I wanted to try and HELP the kids pick up. And, by helping I meant that THEY would do it. This is the true definition of helping when it comes to kids. Why? Well, because if I do it for them, they won't be able to do it on their own next time, and so I was no help at all.
We started at the door of the room. The fact is, we couldn't easily get into the room. So, clearing the area from the door to the bed was the first goal. Because his room is very small, we were able to clear the entire center of the room.
On the following days, we started at the door and worked our way around the room. We made sure that the area cleared on the previous days was still picked up before starting the next area.
The ways that I helped him were to:
1. Tell him where things went (sometimes he didn't know at all and sometimes he had the wrong place in mind).
2. Help him to create a place to put something if there really wasn't a place to put it.
3. Help keep him focused...he would have loved to play with every.single.toy. he found instead of putting it up.
4. I did the true cleaning when we were done-sweeping, vacuuming, etc.
We worked for 15 minutes. I wanted to help him develop a habit of cleaning rather then just me cleaning it up in one big project and then letting it go back downhill for....well, a LONG time. It took an entire week of doing a little each day before it was finally 'done.'
It has been 2 months since this happened. I can honestly tell you that the corners of his room could use a repeat of the cleanup, but the main area of his room has stayed clean for all 2 months, and his bed has been made. I have been very pleased with him as he is just 6 years old.
I did the same progression with Mustang and Mini Cooper. Their room took about 2 weeks. And, overall, it has stayed okay since then. Some days are better then others ;).
The toy room was the hardest and easiest all at the same time. The goal was to simply clear a play area in the center. Each day, we worked for about 15 minutes as a group. We started working on it the first day that we started working on Charger's room. I have to say that it was BY FAR the worst room in the house. So, we worked on it for about 2 solid weeks at 15 minutes a day-all of us (except DH). By the end of the 2 weeks, it was light years better!!
The really great part about picking it up as a group was that we made bins for each toy. I did that myself EVERY time I cleaned up the toy room (alone). The problem? No one else paid attention to which bin was which. So, when I told them to pick up the toy room....no one knew where anything went!
But, after we picked up everyday for 2 weeks, all of a sudden they KNEW where things went!! He he!!!
So, while I won't say that the toy room has been stellar for all this time, I can tell you that when I told the kids to pick it up....low and behold they COULD!!! It was really quite awesome I tell you!!
Now, I won't say that the kid spaces have remained perfect (or even close), BUT you can
walk through them without tripping, you can find most of the things you need to, and the kids can maintain this level on a regular basis. And while I wouldn't say they are company ready, I do think they are 'we live here' clean. That was the goal.
Thanks for stopping by!!
God Bless,
Lisa
Showing posts with label Kid Spaces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kid Spaces. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Organizing the Homeschool STUFF
I have been on a bit of an organizing frenzy lately (thank you 2nd trimester nesting energy). The last couple days I have turned my focus to an area that has been frustrating me for a LOOOOOOONG time. My homeschool stuff.
Our homeschool style is a little different then some. We are very eclectic. We have a curriculum, but I most just use that as a guide to keep me on some sort of track. Then I use that to help me determine our unit lessons and the activities on our shelves. I pull a lot from the Montessori method of learning as well and try to make it all mesh together. This style of learning/teaching seems to require a lot of 'stuff.' Or maybe its just me and my slight addiction to buying learning tools, games, and manipulatives. I like to change things up often and to do that you need things to change to.
As I looked for inspiration for my organization project, it was hard to find! There are many posts about organizing your homeschool. These posts tend to be where to put the glue, crayons and pencils. It just wasnt what I was looking for. I did find one post, on 1+1+1=1, that helped a lot. It makes sense that the blogger that got me going on my homeschool journey would be the one who would understand the need to tell me how to organize all these wonderful school toys and resources.
Here's where I started:
I have designated 1/2 of my storage room for school stuff. My store room is right next to our school room, so the proximity is great for moving things back and forth. I moved all the stuff in here about 2 months ago when I got tired of looking at it in the school room. It wasnt a calm learning atmosphere in my opinion.
As you can see there was an attempt at organization-with banker boxes and such, but this set up wasnt working for me. I couldnt see what was in the boxes and there was no real rhyme or reason to why I put what where except it fit. Of course the last picture shows no organization at all and thats because it wasnt.
So, off to Walmart I went. Like I have mentioned before we just dont have cool organization stores. Thankfully, I found a few things I thought would work and brought them home.
I found these stackable laundry baskets that allowed me to take advantage of the large height of each shelf without using huge, bottomless pit, bins. They can hold little pieces in place while still allowing me to see what's in them and access them pretty easily.
It took me a bit to decide HOW to divide the things I had. I finally came up with the following categories, mostly following the Montessori areas: Math, Language, Practical Life, Sensorial, Geography, Science, Bible, Music, Fall, Christmas/winter, Spring & Summer, Tot School stuff (many of the other things are for Tot school, but some things are just for a Tot), Containers, Building toys, and puzzles.
If you look at the pictures you may realize that there arent THAT many bins. Some things got combined just due to the fact that I had less items in that area. Things too big for the bins were placed just to the side of that bin. I purposely chose to put bins that had overflow on top of bins that didnt so there wasnt any confusion as to which bin it went with.
I didnt create labels, because I'm the only one touching these items and I can see where everything is. I figured that labels in this case were not a priority. I may do them in the future, because I love the way they look :).
And speaking of looks, I did not like the way that this dresser looked in our school room. Its very functional for holding supplies and paper, etc, but it wasnt making a calm atmosphere in our school room. It was heavy and couldnt really go anywhere in the room other then where it was, and I just didnt like it there. I didnt want to loose this storage, though. Drawers provide a great storage medium!
So, I hauled it next door into the storage room. Thankfully, I could do that since the rooms are so close!
The top shelves are being used (mostly) for puzzles. There is also a box of our books on tape, finished work, and a few odds and ends that didnt have another home. The drawers are currently holding extra notebooks, glue, pens, paper, etc. You know the 'normal' stuff :).
I realize that it still has a bit of a cluttered look to it, but that is to be expected with these types of things. At least now, I can close the door on it!
How do you organize your school stuff? I would love to see your set up. Let me know if you have a post I can read about it, please!
Have a great weekend! God Bless!!
Our homeschool style is a little different then some. We are very eclectic. We have a curriculum, but I most just use that as a guide to keep me on some sort of track. Then I use that to help me determine our unit lessons and the activities on our shelves. I pull a lot from the Montessori method of learning as well and try to make it all mesh together. This style of learning/teaching seems to require a lot of 'stuff.' Or maybe its just me and my slight addiction to buying learning tools, games, and manipulatives. I like to change things up often and to do that you need things to change to.
As I looked for inspiration for my organization project, it was hard to find! There are many posts about organizing your homeschool. These posts tend to be where to put the glue, crayons and pencils. It just wasnt what I was looking for. I did find one post, on 1+1+1=1, that helped a lot. It makes sense that the blogger that got me going on my homeschool journey would be the one who would understand the need to tell me how to organize all these wonderful school toys and resources.
Here's where I started:
I have designated 1/2 of my storage room for school stuff. My store room is right next to our school room, so the proximity is great for moving things back and forth. I moved all the stuff in here about 2 months ago when I got tired of looking at it in the school room. It wasnt a calm learning atmosphere in my opinion.
As you can see there was an attempt at organization-with banker boxes and such, but this set up wasnt working for me. I couldnt see what was in the boxes and there was no real rhyme or reason to why I put what where except it fit. Of course the last picture shows no organization at all and thats because it wasnt.
So, off to Walmart I went. Like I have mentioned before we just dont have cool organization stores. Thankfully, I found a few things I thought would work and brought them home.
I found these stackable laundry baskets that allowed me to take advantage of the large height of each shelf without using huge, bottomless pit, bins. They can hold little pieces in place while still allowing me to see what's in them and access them pretty easily.
It took me a bit to decide HOW to divide the things I had. I finally came up with the following categories, mostly following the Montessori areas: Math, Language, Practical Life, Sensorial, Geography, Science, Bible, Music, Fall, Christmas/winter, Spring & Summer, Tot School stuff (many of the other things are for Tot school, but some things are just for a Tot), Containers, Building toys, and puzzles.
If you look at the pictures you may realize that there arent THAT many bins. Some things got combined just due to the fact that I had less items in that area. Things too big for the bins were placed just to the side of that bin. I purposely chose to put bins that had overflow on top of bins that didnt so there wasnt any confusion as to which bin it went with.
I didnt create labels, because I'm the only one touching these items and I can see where everything is. I figured that labels in this case were not a priority. I may do them in the future, because I love the way they look :).
And speaking of looks, I did not like the way that this dresser looked in our school room. Its very functional for holding supplies and paper, etc, but it wasnt making a calm atmosphere in our school room. It was heavy and couldnt really go anywhere in the room other then where it was, and I just didnt like it there. I didnt want to loose this storage, though. Drawers provide a great storage medium!
So, I hauled it next door into the storage room. Thankfully, I could do that since the rooms are so close!
The top shelves are being used (mostly) for puzzles. There is also a box of our books on tape, finished work, and a few odds and ends that didnt have another home. The drawers are currently holding extra notebooks, glue, pens, paper, etc. You know the 'normal' stuff :).
I realize that it still has a bit of a cluttered look to it, but that is to be expected with these types of things. At least now, I can close the door on it!
How do you organize your school stuff? I would love to see your set up. Let me know if you have a post I can read about it, please!
Have a great weekend! God Bless!!
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Organized Basement Playroom
We moved into our new house in March of this year. Ever since, it has been an on going goal to get things unpacked, in a space, and then organize that space. One that has been at the front of my mind is our basement playroom.
I'm going to start with GASP! the before pictures.
To be fair, it didnt always look this way (sometimes it was worse ha, ha). No really, I had gotten so tired of the disorganization that I avoided it for a couple of weeks-which meant the kids didnt have to pick up after themselves-which they loved. We had a number of problems with the set up that have became more apparent the longer we were here, and until they were addressed I refused to spend any energy on the room.
The #1 problem: The basement gets wet. It was dry the first month and a half we were here-until all the snow melted. Then we found out about the problem. Not all the basement gets wet, but half of it. The half I am not showing you would double the size of the playroom, but the toys would be wet about once a month-or more the way this year is going. So we had to move all the toys over to this side of the room, which meant we no longer had enough spaces to put everything away.
2nd problem: The shelving we had was all wooden. Now, we all know that wood and moisture do not mix. I needed to take away the shelves and replace them with something else. I had never completely finished buying all the wood shelves I wanted before I found out it would be a problem. Thankfully, only one of the shelving units ended up with any damage, I caught the problem in time.
3rd problem: (Which I am still working on)-Carpets and water do not mix. The corner of the first rug actually got wet during the last rain storm before the redo-we had gotten 2 inches of rain in about an hour. The other carpet is not in a place it will get wet, but I know it adds to the musty smell so I am on the look out for more foam basement tiles at a good price.
4th problem: It is a BASEMENT playroom. Playrooms should be bright and cheery with fun colors and decorations. We have cement walls, cement floor, and exposed wood work on the ceiling. And, its rented. We have permission to paint as we want, but I'm not sure that painting the basement walls primary colors are what they had in mind.
Solution:
I received a little money from the hubby for my birthday and decided to head off to the local home improvement store and see what kind of PLASTIC shelving I could find. I didnt want to spend ALL my birthday money on plastic shelves, so I was looking in the 25.00 range plastic shelving units.
I had started to made a decision, when a clearance sticker caught my eye. Sitting just to the right of where I had been looking where 3 different sized shelving units. One was 49.99 marked down to 24.95, one was 45.00 marked down to 22.80 and the third was 15.95 marked down to 5.00!! The 5.00 one said it was missing a leg, which meant it would be 3 shelves instead of 4, I was fine with that. The other 2 shelves had the same 'damaged' sticker, but didnt say what was wrong. They were both 'new' products (there were plenty of the same on full price) but at 1/2 price, I preferred these to the others. I was getting twice the product for less then the price I was willing to pay. After verifying I could still return them, if Heaven forbid they were unusable, and I bought them all. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the 2 shelves-nothing. The mark down was a Heaven sent special just for me :). Grand total: 52.75.
Then off to Walmart we went. We have a huge lack of 'fun' organizing stores here. No IKEA, no Target, no Container Store. We have Lowes, Home Depot, Menards and Walmart. Loveliness. I didnt know exactly what I was looking for, but as I walked into the store a voice in my head (I'm thinking the Lord) said 'milk crates.' I was skeptical, but I still walked over to the office supplies and wouldn't you know? The milk crates were 1/2 price! I bought 5 (all there were) and went on. I also purchased 4 laundry baskets, a package of floral wire, and a package of tissue paper-total spent: 36.75.
I still needed artwork, so I took apart an extra copy of Miss Spider's New Car that I found for a quarter at a yard sale and laminated a few pages. Then I made up a few labels and laminated them as well.
After I cleaned, purged, organized, rearranged, created, etc, etc, etc.....
The results:
A clean, organized, decorated, and cheery playroom.
Total price: $89.75. A happy mommy & kids: priceless.
God Bless!!
I'm going to start with GASP! the before pictures.
To be fair, it didnt always look this way (sometimes it was worse ha, ha). No really, I had gotten so tired of the disorganization that I avoided it for a couple of weeks-which meant the kids didnt have to pick up after themselves-which they loved. We had a number of problems with the set up that have became more apparent the longer we were here, and until they were addressed I refused to spend any energy on the room.
The #1 problem: The basement gets wet. It was dry the first month and a half we were here-until all the snow melted. Then we found out about the problem. Not all the basement gets wet, but half of it. The half I am not showing you would double the size of the playroom, but the toys would be wet about once a month-or more the way this year is going. So we had to move all the toys over to this side of the room, which meant we no longer had enough spaces to put everything away.
2nd problem: The shelving we had was all wooden. Now, we all know that wood and moisture do not mix. I needed to take away the shelves and replace them with something else. I had never completely finished buying all the wood shelves I wanted before I found out it would be a problem. Thankfully, only one of the shelving units ended up with any damage, I caught the problem in time.
3rd problem: (Which I am still working on)-Carpets and water do not mix. The corner of the first rug actually got wet during the last rain storm before the redo-we had gotten 2 inches of rain in about an hour. The other carpet is not in a place it will get wet, but I know it adds to the musty smell so I am on the look out for more foam basement tiles at a good price.
4th problem: It is a BASEMENT playroom. Playrooms should be bright and cheery with fun colors and decorations. We have cement walls, cement floor, and exposed wood work on the ceiling. And, its rented. We have permission to paint as we want, but I'm not sure that painting the basement walls primary colors are what they had in mind.
Solution:
I received a little money from the hubby for my birthday and decided to head off to the local home improvement store and see what kind of PLASTIC shelving I could find. I didnt want to spend ALL my birthday money on plastic shelves, so I was looking in the 25.00 range plastic shelving units.
I had started to made a decision, when a clearance sticker caught my eye. Sitting just to the right of where I had been looking where 3 different sized shelving units. One was 49.99 marked down to 24.95, one was 45.00 marked down to 22.80 and the third was 15.95 marked down to 5.00!! The 5.00 one said it was missing a leg, which meant it would be 3 shelves instead of 4, I was fine with that. The other 2 shelves had the same 'damaged' sticker, but didnt say what was wrong. They were both 'new' products (there were plenty of the same on full price) but at 1/2 price, I preferred these to the others. I was getting twice the product for less then the price I was willing to pay. After verifying I could still return them, if Heaven forbid they were unusable, and I bought them all. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the 2 shelves-nothing. The mark down was a Heaven sent special just for me :). Grand total: 52.75.
Then off to Walmart we went. We have a huge lack of 'fun' organizing stores here. No IKEA, no Target, no Container Store. We have Lowes, Home Depot, Menards and Walmart. Loveliness. I didnt know exactly what I was looking for, but as I walked into the store a voice in my head (I'm thinking the Lord) said 'milk crates.' I was skeptical, but I still walked over to the office supplies and wouldn't you know? The milk crates were 1/2 price! I bought 5 (all there were) and went on. I also purchased 4 laundry baskets, a package of floral wire, and a package of tissue paper-total spent: 36.75.
I still needed artwork, so I took apart an extra copy of Miss Spider's New Car that I found for a quarter at a yard sale and laminated a few pages. Then I made up a few labels and laminated them as well.
After I cleaned, purged, organized, rearranged, created, etc, etc, etc.....
The results:
A clean, organized, decorated, and cheery playroom.
Total price: $89.75. A happy mommy & kids: priceless.
God Bless!!
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