Parents of young children have long struggled with having too many toys and not knowing what to do with them all. Maybe your child only plays with a select few things or there’s that one family member who gets them heaps of toys for every birthday and holiday. No matter what the reason, most parents get to a point where they want to clean up and may simply end up tossing the old and unused toys. But toys can get expensive, so we are here to tell you how you can make use of what you already have. With a little creativity, parents can easily breathe new life into their child’s current toys and have fun along the way!
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Use Old Toys for projects
Crafts are a great way to keep your child active, engaged, and learning. Parents can take these toys and repurpose them in fun ways while working on their child’s fine motor skills. For example, if your child has lots of matchbox cars, you can glue them around the edge of a big mirror to give it a creative new spin. You can man the hot glue gun and have your child pick what order to put the cars in (maybe organized by color or size). Then they can hold each down one at a time until they are dry. Now you have a great decoration for your child’s playroom and you even got some skill development in, too! Here are some similar ways to get your craft on:
Toy wreath
Rubber toy planters
Xylophone or piano key windchime
Lego containers
Action figure snow globes
Organize them
There’s a good chance your kids have forgotten about most of the toys at the bottom of their toy bin or closet. Take a couple of hours to sort through them with your kids. Make a donation pile and a keep pile, then get small bins for the remaining toys. Small bins are good so that your kids can easily find the bottom and get to the toys that are there.
Repair them
Before saying goodbye to the toys that your kids put in the donate pile, give them some TLC and see if they change their minds. Some toys will look 100% different with some small touch-ups. This may mean adding new batteries to trucks and light-up toys or washing and putting some patches on an old stuffed animal.
Swap them
If your kids still aren’t jazzed about the toys in that toss pile, you can set up a cheap (and fun!) swap with neighbors, kids in their class, or family members. All you need is each party to bring a bag of unwanted toys and swap with the other. Best case scenario: your child once had a playdate with this same friend and really loved some of their toys. Possibly a few of those are in the bag! If not, it’s still a pretty good deal. Kids aren’t getting new toys but instead, toys that are new to them. At the end of the day, most kids are perfectly happy with that because it means hours of novel playing time are ahead of them.
Give your kid a new perspective
Maybe your child doesn’t like playing with legos. Whether they lost their appeal one day or they never really seemed all that great from the start - your child isn’t a fan. Sit down with your child and ask them to make an entire town out of the legos. Encourage them to add some action figures and dolls and maybe you can use big cardboard boxes as the bases to make tall buildings and long bridges. You can encourage them to build a castle or help them create a racecar or make a petting zoo from scratch. By putting a new twist on some of the toys they’ve seen over and over, it’s almost as good as getting something new. A new perspective can do magical things for your child, not only by boosting their creativity and encouraging pretend play, but by improving their attention and critical thinking to rearrange pieces in a different way. This will also help your child have fun while playing because isn’t that what it’s all about?
Sensory bin fodder
Even if your child doesn’t have sensory concerns, we could all use some more sensory input in our lives. Sensory bins are a great way to encourage curiosity, exploration, and discovery. The best way to do this is with a variety of toys. Small items like tiny blocks, animals, beads, dice, pegs, magnets, letters, plastic eggs, and much more are all great ingredients for a sensory bin. You can either make an entire bin with one or two of these ingredients as the base or use uncooked rice, beans, sand, or dough with one of these items hidden inside. This encourages kids to dig their hands in and find the rarer objects. Another good ingredient that simultaneously invigorates some easy, constantly-repeated puzzles is by adding the pieces to a sensory bin. You can make this even more challenging by putting a time limit and encouraging your child to find all the pieces and complete the puzzle before the buzzer rings!
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to repurpose and reinspire the toys for many other uses. Just a little time with your thinking cap will yield plenty of ideas to give your child fresh, new activities from toys you already have inside your home!
If you’re still looking for new toy ideas, check out the Toy Ideas Amazon Page.