Toys are a fact of life, and if you have kids, you understand why a home has toys strewn about just every available space. For us parents, we’ve made our peace with it. Stepping on lego blocks, sitting down on a squeaky toy, finding a missing doll inside the fridge, seeing tiny cars all over the bathtub, Ravensburger puzzle scattered on the dining table—this is just a taste of what parenthood is like. In fact, as parents, we shouldn’t even think of this as clutter but more like a learning space for our children. The scattered toys are not a mess for them but a playground and the perfect setting for their imagination. What we should do instead is lead the mess into a different kind of mess, at the very least an organised mess.

So, how do you organise toys BUT still leave them out to encourage playtime?

First, declutter. To get rid of the extra stuff, get rid of all the broken toys. Putting these toys away will only take up room that you could use for other things. As your children get older, you will need to make more room for their toys. Take stock of all the toys you have and separate the broken or damaged ones from the ones that are still safe to play with. This is a good way to start cleaning up. Then, put all the broken ones in a trash bag.

Second, donate. For the toys that you still deem safe to play with, pick out which ones your kids are still fond of playing and separate those from the toys that your kids have outgrown. This is the perfect opportunity to donate toys to a local children’s shelter in your community, or perhaps an orphanage or a local daycare centre. The main idea is to give the toys away to places where they will be cherished and played with. You can also give them away to a friend or neighbour who still has young kids.

Third, categorise. Now that you’re left with only the toys that your kids still play with, it’s time to sort and organise them into little categories. The train sets go in one pile, the cars and trucks in another, all the plush toys in another pile, the dolls and their accessories go in another pile, the coloured blocks in another, and the puzzle sets in another pile. You get it, right? The key here is to categorise ALL the toys into bite-sized little pieces so that your kids will know what to look for and where to look for it.

Fourth, store. This is the part where you get to have lots of fun. You have your pick of the litter when it comes to storage items like bins, wicker baskets, plastic toy bins, foldable baskets, console tables with drawers, a convenient bookshelf that you can turn on its side as a toy shelf, or a coffee table with hidden storage compartments.

These days, the selection of storage furniture is astounding. All you have to do is pick something out at the store or browse online and start shopping. Once you have the kind of storage that you want, one that fits in with the aesthetic of your home, you can start putting away the toys that you categorised and organising them by “pile.” You could even ask your kids to help you out.

Fifth, alternate. This is a crucial part of intelligent play. Before your kids wake up for the day, lay out their toys for them and store away the rest. This is a technique called alternate playing where you put out different kinds of toys for each day so that they’ll be able to exercise different cognitive skills and motor skills. For example, your kids could do puzzles on a Monday, building blocks for the next day, dolls and dollhouses on Wednesday, trucks and trains on a Thursday, colouring books and tracing books on a Friday, then physical play like trampolines or hide and seek on a Saturday. The idea here is to offer different playtime adventures for your kids each day so that they won’t get bored with a specific kind of toy. Plus, it’s a good challenge for your kids when they have to use their imagination every single day by having to come up with different play scenarios.

There is definitely a masterful art in learning how to store toys inside your home. This is a good idea that encourages more active and intelligent playtime for your kids. So, ready to try it?