The playroom is more than just a room. Your playroom is the environment that inspires and directs your child’s learning through play. To create a well organized playroom means a well crafted play space sets the stage for great, engaged play. Often the difference between children happily playing or wandering around bored is simply the playroom itself.
Maybe you have a playroom but it seems like more chaotic running and fighting is happening than playing. Or maybe you are creating a new playroom from scratch. Either way, where do you start?
Here are five things that everyone should consider when creating an organized playroom.
1. Low, Durable Playroom Furniture
You want a playroom that will grow with your child. When collecting furniture for your playroom consider the following:
- Height. Is it low and open enough that infants and young children can reach the first couple shelves? This will make your child’s toys accessible to them, thus encouraging independent play.
- Durability. Is everything durable to withstand years of young children playing with it?
- Color. I prefer wood furniture or muted colors so they blend more into the background. It seems like bright, happy colors should be perfect for children, but often too much color is overwhelming to young children.
Depending on your space, for an infant you will likely want one or two shelves, a play mat, and some soft items like big pillows or soft rugs. As your child gets older you might want to add a small table with chairs, a pretend kitchen, train table, etc.
2. Space & Flow in an Organized Playroom
Now you have your furniture and you are deciding where to put everything. Try to step into the mind of a child while you are moving around your shelves.
- How will they use the toys on this shelf?
- Where will they want to play?
- Where will they need to get to? Is there a direct path to the door or the bathroom?
- Is there an obvious circular path that they will want to run around again and again?
Work on creating defined spaces for different types of play. This is how you avoid having block towers toppling over onto someone trying to read a book. Try to separate quieter areas from louder areas with the way you arrange the shelves or play mats.
Most playrooms will have:
- A shelf near a larger space for building, putting together puzzles, driving cars.
- A shelf near a table for activities such as small puzzles, lacing, art, and other fine motor activities.
- A kitchen and pretend play area. Often there are hooks on the wall for costumes.
- A quiet area with a bookshelf or book basket, a rug, and perhaps some big pillows or a tent.
3. Playroom Light, Art, and Plants
It perhaps seems odd to care about beauty when you are thinking about children’s play, but a beautiful, calm playroom produces beautiful, calm play. A busy, loud playroom creates busy, loud play. There is a good chance that you don’t have much control over the space that will be used for a playroom but you can,
- Take advantage of any natural light by placing the main play spaces near the window.
- Consider adding a softer additional light source like rope lights or lamps for when it gets darker instead of bright, harsh overhead lighting.
- Hang some photos or artwork lower at the eye line of your child.
- Consider adding some plants. They are a wonderful way for children, even toddlers, to learn to care for something and add simple, natural beauty to your space.
4. Playroom Toys Storage Solutions
When it comes to storing toys, you will need two kinds of spaces and materials.
1. Storing Toys for Play
For toys laid out for your child to play, you will want low shelves and some open baskets or buckets. Gather some sturdy baskets in a variety of sizes, craft stores are good for these, and use them to store your toys. If you prefer, solid plastic tubs will also do the job well.
Divide toys into groups such as; legos, blocks, cars, dolls. Put one type of toy in each basket. This makes cleaning up simple.
2. Storing Toys to Rotate
I wrote an entire post on how to rotate toys, but you will want to put some toys away to rotate into your playroom later. Put these in large gallon ziploc bags and clear plastic storage tubs.
5. Amount of Toys in the Playroom
Too many or too few toys in your playroom will result in chaos, squabbles, or boredom. I’m going to give you my top tips for De-Cluttering toys in the next Playroom 101 post.
For now, start by throwing away anything broken or missing pieces and start by placing fewer toys on the shelves than you think you need. You can always add more later.
THINGS TO CONSIDER FOR YOUR ORGANIZED PLAYROOM
In the Playroom 101 series you will learn how to:
- Why you need a good playroom organization
- How to de-clutter your toys
- How to teach your child to clean up
- How to choose the best toys for your child’s developmental needs
- How to present toys in the playroom
- Questions and solutions for when your playroom isn’t working
- How to maintain your playroom organization
If you find this series helpful, you might like to check series of articles – Less Toys. More Play. where we went into depth how to use fewer toys for more play.
I wish we had an extra room to make into a play room! That would be so cool.
It is a wonderful thing to have a playroom, but I assure you it is not necessary. We are fortunate to have one at our old house, but in our current house we have play spaces integrated into our different living spaces and it works great too.
We have multiple play areas in our living space. Have you written any posts about your set up? Do you rotate toys in their rooms as well?
This is so helpful! I can’t wait for your toy de-clutter tips… I definitely need that sort of advice 🙂 Thanks for sharing on Toddler Fun Friday!
Thanks Tina! I’m so glad you are finding the series useful. I’m excited to share about de-cluttering. I am an organizing dork so it is one of my favorite parts. Thanks for reading!
I need your advice. How do I set up a playspace for my 4 yr old who is in a wheelchair? He is paralyzed from the waist down, he can scoot around on the floor or be in his chair. We also have a foster daughter who is 3 but delayed about yr and half developmentally. I have made a number of sensory bins and activities. Our FD is a huge sensory seeker. We have an art table set up that our son can reach in his wheelchair. They share a room and other play area is in the living/tv room. I need ideas. Please help.
Thank you,
Marty
Wow Marty! What a great question. It is a complicated question to answer without seeing the space or really knowing the kids, but a few things pop into my mind that will hopefully help.
The main goal is for both of your kids to be able to play independently. I think you would want two main play spaces either in the same room or different rooms.
One with low shelving and an open space so your son can sit on the floor and play. You will want to make sure he can reach everything on his shelves from the floor so he can be independent. I’m picturing a couple of shelves near a floor space for playing where he can move around. I’m picturing a carpet or rug but you’ll want to keep in mind having a firm enough surface that he can build with blocks if that’s something he enjoys.
Then you also want some shelving near the table where his chair can fit for activities he can do at the table. The art table might work to double for other things. Tables can work for games, puzzles, Legos, writing, math manipulatives etc so those types of things can sit on / be rotated to a shelf or two that he can reach from and move around from his chair. Since your foster daughter is developmentally so much younger I would try to think of a shelf space that either she can’t reach or in some way private for materials that are too young for her or for projects that he wants to save.
For your foster daughter who loves all things sensory your sensory bins are a great start. My daughter was similar at that developmental age and I found it helpful to have a combination of messy and non-messy sensory materials on hand at all times. Less messy things like balls or bean bags with different textures, things she could mouth, and books with textures went in our playroom.
In our kitchen I kept our sensory bin that I pulled out at least once a day. I had some gallon ziploc bags with sensory bases (sand, dried beans, play do, etc) and I’d pour one base and then add some simple toys (often plastic washable trucks, people, pretend cooking stuff that could get put in the dishwasher). I put it all on the floor with a huge beach towel under it and encouraged her to stay on the towel.
The biggest way to keep her happy was lots of time outside. Every child is different but mine needed the space to move and the sensory input of outside for a couple hours every day to be somewhat calm and focused inside.
You are balancing a lot! This is getting long so I’m going to stop hear but if I can be more helpful or answer more specific questions please send me an email (erin@bambinitravel.com) and I’m happy to help.
Erin