How I Rotate Our Toys

Messy cabinets….we all have them (evidence above)!! Toy rotation has helped us in so many ways! Not only has it eliminated a little bit of clutter, but it keeps my kids engaged and excited about what they are playing with for much longer! I’m going to outline the process I did when I started rotating toys – and share how I maintain it now. My goal is to change them out on the 1st of every month, but there are definitely times I forget! It seriously feels like Christmas every time I bring out the “new” toys and the girls get so excited!

First: Organize your toys and decide what you want to rotate. For us this was easy. I knew I’d keep everything out in our downstairs playroom – it houses things like the play kitchen, blocks, dress up, musical instruments etc. Upstairs was and is my focus for toy rotation. I cleaned out our cabinets and organized things into categories the best I could: puzzles, games, bins with smaller toys like figurines and cars and then ‘other’ toys that didn’t fit.

Next: I ordered bags to help organize toys for storage and to help organize things that we keep out. It’s saved us so much space! I have both this set and this set of bags and they have held up great and work really well for containing small parts and pieces!

Rotate: I decide what I want to leave out from each category and make sure it neatly fits into our cabinet. The rest goes into large bins in the storage area under our stairs that I can easily access. We have 3 huge bins right now that I use for this.

I always leave out our figurines, cars/Paw Patrol vehicles and the art cabinet stays the same. I rotate everything else including Duplos, Plus Plus blocks etc. This seriously helps us in the long run!! I always be sure to have something from the ‘building’ category out but what it is always rotates. I follow this same method for everything else! Right now we have out only our new Christmas toys and games so we have the magnetic Tegu blocks and some Paris & NYC blocks. The girls do always have out allll their babies & doll stuff in their room too.

I also always keep a catch-all basket out under our living room coffee table for random toys that end up upstairs and I try to clear it out once a month when I rotate!

I often get asked about what age to start doing this and honestly I’d even start it now with Alice if I was motivated to get organized. She has accumulated a ton of baby toys at 6 months and would benefit the same way my older kids do from this toy rotation system!