I recently had the pleasure of helping two girls move into separate rooms.
These 2nd and 4th grade girls had spent their entire lives sharing the same room and now that they are older (and all grown up, they say!) the oldest gets to move into her own separate bedroom.
There were three stages to this project:
1. Sort through clothes
2. Sort through books
3. Sort through toys and papers
STAGE ONE – Clothes Sort
The first step taken to separate the clothes was to figure out:
#1 Whose clothes were whose
#2 See if they still fit the owner
So to start, each girl went through the closet and decided either to keep, toss, donate or handed it off to the other sister so she could proceed with the same process.
After we sorted clothes, we moved the 4th graders clothes down into her new room so I could determine what type of organizing supplies were needed to set up a system within her closet.
STAGE TWO – Books
Following the same process, we continued into both steps of determining who owned what and eliminating the unloved or unused books from their gigantic collection.
By the time we made it to stage two, the girls were feeling a bit ancy so we decided to up the fun factor and have a book auction!
This is how it went:
I held up a book and each girl could vote for it if she wanted it.
The first hand up – got the book.
If no one raised their hand it went off to charity for some other young child to receive who normally could not afford new book.
If there was a tie, the girls had to barter among themselves for what was fair and if they could possibly trade out later.
The funniest thing happened during this process! I was holding up what appeared to me to be a great reference book on animals. When neither of the girls raised their hand, I asked will you possibly need this for future class projects? The second grader looks at me in disbelief and says ” there is such a thing as the internets you know!” I think I will always remember that day!
Kids are truly tuned in, tapped on and hooked automatically into the internet! Isn’t it great? Thinking about it now, I think it is such an advantage for any school report – most of the information in the world is literally at our fingertips x 100,000 or more!
After these two steps, we called it a day and set up our next appointment so we could tackle toys and finish setting up systems within each room.
STAGE THREE – Toys, toys and more toys!
On the first day we did a rough sort of toys and placed each sister’s toys put into boxes and then moved them into each closet so we could sort later.
Now it was time to sort, eliminate and organize all of the other toys throughout the house.
Dad did an amazing job gathering all random toys and setting us up to sort them in the den.
To keep it fair and make it more fun, the girls wanted to do another auction – this time with Barbies and all of her accessories. Dad suggested that we use a giant bin for donations and he was definitely correct! with all of the small pieces, shoes, clothes and Barbies, we filled up a giant bin for donations. The girls did a great job!
After sorting, we jumped into containerizing and decide if the toys should live in the bedroom closet or the newly designed toy closet.
SETTING UP THE TOY CLOSET
In between appointments, he also purchased and installed two new shelves and a rolling cart for mom’s work out equipment so it would fit within the toy closet.
The rolling cart is such a smart idea! When mom wants to work out, she simply rolls it out of the toy closet and all her weights and belts are right there and ready to use!
All in all, this project turned out great and the girls were so much fun to work with, even when they got bored and restless! They are great sisters who truly love and respect each other.
As an author and lover of books, I am also relieved to see that even with the ‘internets’ they are avid readers of “real” books with covers and actual paper pages inside!
