Toys

One month ago I separated all of the kids toys into groups. I managed to make four groups out of the toys that we have. Imaginary, Motion, building/ABC's, and animals/farm. those were the best categories that I could think of to make out of our selection of toys. And then we tried to match our reading with each category. We started with motion ( I have been doing just over a weeks with each category). This category consisted of cars, trains, balls, baseball and bat... books consisting of Thomas the train, cars... We then went to imaginary. This consisted of dolls, weebalot castle, tea set, drums/music... and then stories/books like Cinderella, dragons... We are now on building/ABC I guess is what I would call it. This category consist of our blocks, building blocks, stacking train, shape sorters and our new cash register/food toy. Books consisting of ABC's, numbers, shapes...

New cash register with food! She loves grocery shopping! I wish I could just send her out to get groceries in real life!

I use to just split the kids toys 50/50 and trade them up ever couple of weeks but I have found this to work much better. I also think it helps to have the categories. I am hoping now that I have a working vehicle again to also get into a habit of going to the library each weeks and check out some books related to each category to take home as we don't have a huge selection of books and the selection we have is getting very old! Some of the libraries out here have boxes/kits that you can check out that are themed I am going to try those also.

I have found by doing this that both Emily and Cooper spend more time playing with the toys then playing with the other things around the house that they are not suppose to touch :)

I am hoping to start incorporating a pretend play category so that I can split up music and imaginary we don't very much musical toys nor do we have much dress up so I have just put the two together. Emily really enjoys pretending to be a chef, doctor and a carpenter... She also loves to play our mini keyboard and the drums. Tony it not go for more noisy toys so I think we will be sticking with just those! It has been hard to find used music toys that work well but I am on the hunt!

I am trying to get the kids closet organized for toy storage so that I can place the kitchen in there and only put it out with pretend play because Emily hardly ever uses it anymore and I think it is because it is always out. She use to have so much fun with it when we first got it and then each time we've move it to a different location she gets interested in it again but she hasn't played with it in a while so I am going to take it out of the picture for a little bit.

The whole reason for starting this new toy rotation is because two months ago I stopped letting Emily watch t.v. She never really watched a whole lot in the first place and only selected shows; I have to admit it was convenient and helpful to just put her in from of the t.v. for Cooper first year but I didn't like how addicted she was getting to it. We do a lot of crafts now instead but I found that I had to keep her busy with crafts to keep her from getting into trouble ( and that gets tiring) so in an attempt to get her playing with her toys I chose to categorize them. She still gets to watch the occasional movie or cartoons but only about once or twice a week if that.

Here are some pictures and a video for those of you who suffered through reading this whole blog!

He thinks I didn't notice him go under the computer!!

Arg she saw me!