[VIDEO]: Organizing for Kids: How to Teach Kids Where Things Belong
In this video I show you an easy (and fun) way to teach your kids where things belong! Of course there are so many things you need to do when it comes to teaching kids about organization, but this is just one way to make a fun “game” out of it!
Hi, everyone. So in this video, I want to show you one way to teach your children how to put things back where they belong. So right here, I have three organizing baskets and let me just quickly tell you where I got these. So I got these at Dollar Tree. I got them recently and I saw them and I was like, “Oh, these are nice baskets. They have a handle on them just like that and they’re bright pink, they’re kind of fun for kids so yeah. So they’re just fun. They come in three different colors. I saw them in pink, green, blue, and I think there was a yellow also. But yeah, for a dollar, it’s a great price.
Teaching Kids how to Organize
So teaching kids where to put things back, so in this example we are going to use a stack of books. These three bins and color-coded dot stickers, which I’ll provide a link below in the description on where you can get these in like 25 different colors. If you don’t have color-coded dot stickers, all you can do is cut out like a square or a circle of construction paper and then just use it with tape to tape it on to these baskets.
One way to teach kids where to put things back is to play a matching game. So in this case, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put one color dot sticker on each bin. So I’m going to put a blue sticker on this bin right here then I’m going to put a nice, bright orange sticker on the second bin and then I’m going to put a green sticker on a third bin.
So once you pick your colors then you’re going to assign categories to each of the colors. So for example, what do you want blue to stand for? We’re going to say that blue stands for animal books. And then we’re going to say that orange stands for car books. And then we’re going to say that green stands for superhero books.
So then once you assign a category, you want to somehow write your category down on your basket. In this case, we are going to use the photo labels that I have created. You can find them on my website, Alejandra.TV. Right here, I have the label. It says animals. And we are just going to stick it to the front of the basket just like that then we’re going to do that for each of the three baskets.
So the second one we said as cars. It’s nice to have a picture because kids are receptive to pictures and if they don’t know how to read yet, they could just look at the photo and immediately know that OK, things that relate to cars go inside this basket. Kids are also receptive to colors so playing a matching game which I’m about to show you is a really cool way to teach them where things belong.
All right. We have our labels. We have our dot stickers. Now, for our stack of books. So we’re just going to say for example, this book is an animal book. It’s not really an animal book. We’re going to pretend like it is. So what you want to do is grab your color-coded dot sticker and we said that animals was blue. So we’re going to take a blue sticker just like that and we are going to put it in the back of the book just like that.
Now, if you want to put it on the interior of the book, you can do that also. Or you could put it on the back of the book as well. Just put it somewhere. So when your child is going to put this book away, all they do is they just look for the color and say blue. OK, blue goes in the blue bin. So then they just put the book right in there. Nice and easy.
So we’re going to do this with two more books. OK. So this book, we’re going to pretend like this book is a car book, which it’s not really but we are just going to pretend like it is. So we have an orange sticker. Put them on the back. And you can even do this with your kids. Like it’s kind of fun to stick the sticker on. So when you’re setting up this system, have your kids be involved. Let them put the sticker on. Let them play the game and say, “OK. Orange belongs here.” And have them place the book inside of the orange basket. Yeah, that was kind of confusing to say.
All right. This is green. So we are going to pretend like this book is a car book. Obviously, it’s not really a car book but we’re going to pretend like it is. So I put my green sticker right there and then put it inside of the green basket. So there you go. That’s how you set up an easy to use intuitive system that’s very simple to have your kids put things away in the right spot by just playing a matching game.
So if you can just set this up with your kids, teach them how to use it, and then enforce having them use the system like you have to tell them to use the system and show them how to do that. If you can do that consistently, it’s going to make a big difference in how well you can teach your kids where things go.
So I hope this video was helpful. If you want to know where you can get my photo labels go to Alejandra.TV. You can download them from there. And then I will also put a link to where you can find the color-coded dot stickers in 25 colors. If you want more organizing videos or tips, visit my website at Alejandra.TV. And I’ll see you soon. Bye!
If you’ve already purchased the photo labels, you can go to the Alejandra.tv login page.