LEGO organization
LEGO, amirite? If you had asked me five years ago if LEGO would take over closets in our house, I would have laughed and said, "NOPE!" And here we are, a LEGO family.
6-year-old C1 does some fantastic work with LEGO. 3-year-old C2 has detailed stories with LEGO. 1-year-old C3 wants to eat and/or monster ALL the LEGO.
Storing and organizing LEGO has become a continually evolving project. As the kids' LEGO work has developed over time, so have the organization methods.
Teaching the kids how to store and organize LEGO has become a great way of teaching executive functioning skills. Some kids (people) naturally develop executive functioning skills, others benefit from direct instruction.
I explicitly teach the kids why we organize things and how to organize things. Below you will find our LEGO organization process and (current) organization system.
Teaching Kids to Organize:
I teach the kids to organize the same way I do. These points below are exactly what I tell the kids.
Get out all the things
When you start an organizing project, you need to get out all of the things before you start organizing. It looks worse before it looks better. Breathe.
Do a quick sort into 3 groups (keep, deal with, done with)
Make a spot for LEGO builds that need a home, LEGO that you need to think about, and LEGO pieces/builds that need to be broken down and put away. This process is a quick look to make sense of this big mess we just made when we got out everything.
Go through the “deal with” pile
Go through the “deal with” pile and sort that into 3 groups: keep, working on, and done with.
This step is where it's important to break things down into small, manageable amounts. I do not plop the entire "deal with" pile in front of the kids. I pull out a little bit at a time — typically as much as I can grab in one handful. I tell the kids: "Let's do this a little bit at a time. When we have a big project like this, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Like your brain is exploding and you can't see the way out. Break it down into small amounts. I’m going to help you break it down into small amounts.”
It's important not to place judgment on what a child values and wants to keep. Play is the work of the child. What we see as "play" is "work" in their mind.
Organize the “keep” group
Now we have 3 new groups: keep, working on, and done with. We need to organize the keep things. We sort the keep things by type.
I ask the kids to see what categories of things they have. For this particular LEGO project, 6-year-old C1 was able to separate his keep pile into categories quickly. We physically moved the items into distinct categories on the floor. His self-assigned categories were: vehicles, Technic, Ninjago, Friends, and palace-build (his current project).
Put things away
Now that we organized everything, we need to put it away in a way that we can find what we need and put things away quickly. Everything needs a home. We label the containers to help us remember what is inside.
Active project bin
Keep bins by category
Special pieces bin
All the remaining pieces
Minifigure case
Keep it organized
We spent a lot of time organizing this. Let's keep it organized. We need a To-Do bin. If you need to clean up quickly, this bin will be the place we put things that you need to think about. We should go through this regularly.
I ask, "When do you want to go through your to-do box? Every day? Once a week? Do you want help going through it?" C1 decides we will go through his To-Do box on Sundays and go through all the keep bins during our off week of homeschool (we are doing 5 weeks on, 1 week off).
Our Current LEGO Organization:
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We have two different LEGO organization systems right now. 6-year-old C1’s LEGO are organized by color and build. 3-year-old C2’s LEGO are organized into 1 bin of special builds and 1 bin of loose pieces. Everyone can work with all of the LEGO.
C1’s loose pieces are organized by color into this cart.
C1’s builds and active projects are organized by type in IKEA Trofast bins. We have extra shallow and deep bins to swap out as needed.
C1’s “special pieces” and “to be sorted” categories are in under bed storage bins and stored under a bed. These are great because they are shallow and it’s easy to look through them.
C1 and C2 each have one of these containers for their minifigures and accessories.
We have a variety of Container Store storage boxes. They are very durable and last forever. C2’s builds are stored in the Sweater Box size right now.
C2’s loose pieces for building are currently in a Swoop bag. I love Swoop bags, they are incredibly versatile.
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