Legos: Organization and Ideas

With Christmas coming, I've been thinking about gifts.  This is partly because I have a baby due at the beginning of December and hope to be ahead on it this year :)

Jay has had 6 years of Lego gifts.  And they have been collecting.  But not getting as much use as I thought they would.  Jay loves to build, but would choose other toys instead.

I started to wonder if it was simply because of the way the {little} piles of legos were stored?

With a fresh installment of legos from last Christmas and his birthday last year I decided to do change how the legos were presented and see if it made a difference.

And now that it's been 9 months I thought I would share the results of what I found out from {this little project}.

I'm not a neat freak. I like things organized.  But I'm quite "right-brained" and if things are too organized it feels too sterile to me.  But on the flip side of that, chaos does not stimulate creativity.  It prevents it.  So I try to find a happy place in between the extremes in our home.

Our legos were stored in a clear container, but just jumbled together.  I decided to get some shallow bins with dividers and group like colors together like this:

And like this:

I put Kay's pink legos in her own bin too.  The thing I like about these bins is you can change the dividers in them.  So we can re-group as needed when their collection changes.  

The small bins are great for the{little} lego guys/girls and all their accessories!

 

I picked up these organizers at Michael's.  They go on sale for 1/2 price pretty often.  The fact that they are not deep bins has made all the difference!  It's much easier to find what you are looking for.  And they are clear so you know if you have the right box.

 Jay and Kay can see their pieces at a glance and they play with them all the time now!

I was worried that Jay and Kay would not want to clean up their legos if they had to really put them away in the right spot.  But, they put all the colors and pieces away where they go just fine when they are done playing and disassemble their work.  And they don't seem mind at all-yay!

We keep a small container out for the {little} legos that don't make it back into the organizer boxes  on time (and are found under the dresser or something) so they can be collected.  Then the next time the legos are out they put those away too.

We have needed to keep them away from Ellie.  And we try to keep the lids closed so they don't get bumped and spilled by her.  But even she has come to respect them and has started to join in the play.

 For organizing and keeping track of instruction booklets I put together a binder with page protectors.  The directions that come with the sets go in there.  But we have a lot of legos that didn't come with a set.  And for ideas of what to build with instructions, we've visited this site.

It has all the building instructions from all the past sets!  You can print any you want!  After choosing what they want to build, I just print, and hole-punch the directions and put them in the binder.  I put tabs in the binder to organize the different kinds of instructions.

We also got Jay this book for Christmas last year.  I liked that it didn't have a lot of directions.  It's just building inspiration.  It gives him ideas and he can use his own creativity from there.  He really likes it and it's just what I hoped it would be.

It's been nine months since I took this photo.  And I'm happy to say that the legos look just the same as they did then, when we started {this little project}.  It's been a long enough test that I thought it was worth sharing the idea with you :)



Happy Building!