playroom ideas

does anyone have any good sites, personal pics or ideas for a playroom for their twins.. i utiize my whole basement for the kids but am not quite too sure how to organize it... they have so much stuff and sometimes i think they feel overwhelmed.. !! any advice would be great thanks

 

Some general good ideas to remember when organising are;
*Kids play more with toys they can see
*It's much easier if they can reach things for themselves
*They will get overwhelmed by too many toys
*If they haven't seen something for a while they will play with it like it's new

So with that in mind I'd look for some open storage boxes that you can have at their height level like these or these (the second ones are on a UK website, but I just wanted to show you what I meant). If you feel that they have lots of stuff then maybe try rotating things. Have certain toys 'out' for them to see and play with and then every month or so switch them over with toys that have been stored out of sight. Also if you plan to have books out for them you might want to consider a bookshelf that displays the front of the books like this because they are more likely to get them out and look at them if they can see the covers.

ETA: clarity

 

I would love to see some photos of the play room to share. :winking0009:

Diana w/Rianna and Justin (17.5 mos)

 

So murals! Buy a Tracer projector from an art store, and a collection of quarts of paints and use picture books or your own drawings to do it. You can do different themes on different walls; jungle, grocery, Dr's office, etc.

I have pics but not techy enough to put it here - email me and I can send a couple....

 

If you have a good sized, spacious basement, I would suggest setting in up kind of like "centers" like they do in preschool or I did when teaching kindergarten. In my classroom I had a:

Housekeeping center (or area) which had all the kitchen stuff, and a table and chairs and a baby doll highchair and all that. I also had dress up clothes there so they could pretend they were going to work or whatever they wanted. Some of my other teachers called it the Pretend Center. You could even have a phone and some take out menus so they pretend to order pizza or from a place you order food if you do.

Library Center (one of the most popular) with all the books, puppets, a puppet theater. The library center was also our "meeting area" so I had all of our morning meeting stuff there like the calendar, the weather graph, the bear that we would dress according to the weather, and several posters that had the names of the months, or nursery rhymes or the alphabet, numbers etc. which gave them the opportunity to reinforce what they were learning as a class in small play and pretend to be the teacher.

Puzzle Center (self explanitory)

Alphabet center- alphabet books, alphabet flash cards, and any games or toys that had to do with learning the alphabet.

Science center-had magnifying glasses (plastic of course) and a lot of science books, puzzles, games or toys that allowed them to learn and explore science.

Block center- Anything to do with blocks or building toys.

Math center-all kinds of manipulatives or anything to do with counting

Doll house center (again, self explanitory)

Art center- I had child safety scissors, paper, crayons, markers, stencils, tissue paper pieces, magazines for cutting pictures out, and glue

Easel center

I had some other centers but they were a little bit more advanced and had to do with the curriculum we taught.

I think you get the idea. It can be a lot of fun to set up seperate little areas. This is just an idea that I'm throwing out at you.