Organize your child’s educational materials to create increased learning, communication and fun at home

Now that you’ve create your child’s progress nook, you will need to organize your child’s learning toys, materials and tools. If you haven’t created your child’s progress nook yet, do that first here!

Organize your child’s learning materials in his or her progress nook in 3 simple steps!

In order to follow my process and created an organized progress nooks for your child, you will need these materials :

A quality camera or smartphone to take photos
Laminator
Laminating sheets to create labels (I recommend 125 microns, which refers to the thickness of the laminating sheets so that your labels are solid and resistant.)
Sharp scissors to cut apart labels
IKEA Trofast furniture and bins

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Step 1 : Coral like items together.

According to our toy inventory checklist, we have divided the materials that you need for a special needs playroom into 6 categories :

In addition to making sure you have all of the learning materials you need to help your child progress, you will go ahead and divide these materials up further into activities and put the materials to complete each activity into boxes or drawers.

For example, each puzzle could have its own drawer or box. Each box or drawer could contain felt garden materials, your child’s Spring Chicks Sensory Box activity and gardening materials.

I love the idea of having one activity per box or drawer because you can ask your child to go take the whole drawer or box to complete the activity.

Step 2 : Organize your child’s educational materials using child-size furniture & bins

I use IKEA Trofast children’s furniture and bins to store toys and all learning materials in my learning center.

Step 3 : Use visual photo labels to organize your child’s educational materials by category

Children who have limited communication skills will benefit enormously from visual support around your home. Learners with autism are particularly visual learners a lot of the time.

In order to create organized bins, I gather items by activity. The children’s cooking accessories for their play kitchen go in a bin together. Everything I need to propose a farm animal sensory activity (farm animal figurines and dried lentils) goes in a bin together. On the front of the bin, I attach a photo that is representative of the contents of the box.

Notes : Adding lids to your storage bins will make them stackable

You can also buy lids for your IKEA bins. If you use the lids, the bins are stackable. In this case you can stack them directly on shelves. This is how I organize the sensory materials in my learning house, such as Play-Doh, kinetic sand and play foam.

The children use the photo labels in several different ways. Photo labels help the kids know where to find a particular item they are looking for, they can exchange the photo (hand the photo to me or another adult) to request the activity they would like to do and they also know where to put toys away when they are done playing. (Yes, the kids clean up their activities all by themselves!)