MelindaG
TOYS, this is one area I feel I am so missing something!!! I would love to see how you store, what types you love, and what you do with them all!!!
Second question, can you give a sneak peek into your learning/school room/area?? If there even is one!
I have a theory about toys. If you buy cheap (and sometimes not-so-cheap) plastic toys that break easily your children will not learn to care for them. They learn they can be replaced easily with more cheap toys. And toys breed. Worse than rabbits! This theory has come from my own experience. I was tired of all the little plastic pieces we’d find here and there and the battery operated noise makers that would blink and twinkle.
Does that mean my kids don’t have plastic toys? Nope. They do have some but we are getting away from them as much as possible. I’ve found the best toys are the same old-fashioned standards that have been around for ages, the ones that require some effort on the child’s part to either put it together or use their imagination. We don’t have any video games or Wii. One afternoon I was so fed up with changing batteries and noisy toys playing the same confounded song over and over again that I up and gathered them all together and dropped them off at the thrift store. Silence really was golden that day!
All of our toys are kept in, dum-da-da-da! . . .plastic containers. And I hate them because they are 1) plastic 2)they break 3)sometimes we lose the lids. I do like that the smallest kids can see at a glance what are in them. The containers are also uniform in size and fit perfectly on the custom shelves my husband built in the children’s bedrooms. I’m still in limbo as to what I want to get to store toys in. Anybody have any good ideas? What do you like to store your toys in?
Here’s a run-down of the toys we currently have. All have their own containers.
- Dress-up clothes
- Puppets and a puppet theater
- dolls – babies and American Girl Dolls (the girls really take care of the AG dolls as they had to earn half the money for them)
- tea set – real porcelain
- felt food
- wooden train tracks
- Lincoln logs
- wooden puzzles
- John Deere tractors (most are metal, some are plastic)
- assortment of cars, cattle trucks, and semi-trucks (some plastic)
- balls – soccer, basketball, baseball
- scooters and bicycles
- Legos (the only plastic toys I really like!)
We also have a cabinet full of board and card games. Some of our favorites to play are Set
The baby has some plastic toys right now. I’m currently looking at etsy for handmade wooden toys to replace those. I’m also hunting for really good jump ropes. I don’t want the cheap ones from Wal-mart. We want to learn double dutch. Again, anybody know of a good source to purchase those?
That’s it. Hmm….looking at the list I wonder how our house gets so messy!
I’ll show a picture of our learning/school room area in tomorrow’s post.
All this week I’m answering questions from my readers. Are you curious about something? Go here and ask away!
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