If you’re like me, you’ve accumulated a lot of sensory play materials over the years and you struggle to keep up with storing and organizing all of it. Well, I finally got the time to get it all organized and here are some of my favorite tips and tricks to keep your playroom tidy while enjoying lots of fun (and sometimes messy) sensory play. In this room, I store over 200 sensory play activities along side a multitude of other toys and books.

1. Closed storage units

Okay okay. I know Montessori moms love the open and accessible shelving units for kids to have play items accessible and visual. And of course they’re great for toy rotations. But I find they just aren’t practical. Not all of your child’s toys need to be out and available and if we’re talking aesthetics, not all of them are pretty toys. So have a mix of open and closed shelving so that toys are at the ready but also there are some drawers to tuck away items not in use. We love our Aspect Modular shelves from Crate and Barrel. You can make a custom configuration that suits your room.

2. Peg Board Organizers

The Skadis pegboard from IKEA has been a lifesaver for us. I can easily store and display small parts and accessories for sensory play. We have our resin letters from @busylittles, we have our emotions pieces from @thesensoryexperience, and our resin pieces from @busylittles all stored neatly in these little containers. Plus we have our wool balls from @wonderyearsshop and our memory games from @bannortoys. Everything is sorted yet accessible so that we can pull them out at a moments notice.

This is a great way to store the sensory fillers that you’re going to use pretty regularly. Wool balls, kinetic sand, grapat and mandala toys, buttons, washi tape, and more. We also use the mesh wire bins to hold our GoodnightFox flashcards — the sets that we pull out most are Letter Sounds, Letters, High Frequency Words, and Emotions.

Resin Letters & Gems by Busy Littles
Emotions pieces by The Sensory Experience
Wool balls by The Wonder Years Shop
Dinosaur Bones by Creating Adventures Co
Rainbow Wooden Crayons by Oak & Co
Rainbow Chickpeas by Curious Wren
Alphabet Clips, Nuts & Bolts Erasers, Letter Erasers from Target Dollar Spot
Grapat & Mandala pieces from Amazon
Silicon Silly String from Amazon
Acrylic Characters by GoodnightFox
Flashcards by GoodnightFox
Playsilks by Sarah’s Silks
Peg Occupations Dolls by TinyMountainMovers
Resin pieces from Little October House

3. Sterilite Storage Bins & Containers

Most of our storage is in our closet. We store by theme in our Sterilite 15qt bins and our 4qt bins. We put toys, printables, flashcards, materials / fillers in these bins by theme. And our favorite hack is using our GoodnightFox flashcards at the front of each bin so that we can remember what the theme of each bin is.

4. BULK Food STORAGE containers FOR FILLERS

These work great for larger items and then for fillers and smaller materials, we use these free containers from the bulk foods section at WholeFoods. It’s so great because they’re free and come in two sizes so that we can easily store multiple colors of rice, chick peas, and other fillers. And they work great for keeping snacks and cereal from going stale!

5. Photo Storage Bins for small parts

Creating organized, themed storage solutions for small sensory play items is a game-changer in toy organization and playroom storage. I discovered an amazing hack using clear plastic photo storage boxes for this purpose. These 4x6 boxes are perfect for keeping tiny parts together and sorted by theme, allowing for quick and easy access to specific sensory play items.

What makes these storage boxes even more incredible is how 16 of them neatly fit into a portable case. This feature is a lifesaver for on-the-go activities, as you can easily keep them in your car for spontaneous play sessions. Whether it's a long road trip or a quick visit to a friend's house, having these boxes at hand ensures endless fun without worrying about missing pieces.

You can snag these on Amazon or wait for them to go on sale at Michaels!

6. Candy Jar clear containers

I found these in the target dollar spot one day and absolutely couldn’t resist. I have so many legos and I wanted to organize them all by color and essentially turn them into decor for the room instead of loose parts to hide and shove somewhere. You can store these containers on a shelf or use command strips to fix them to the wall. You can even use them for other things like sensory fillers (I use them to store chickpeas) but you can also store fillers like sand, corn, peas, beans, foam and more!

If you have room on your walls and you’re looking for a creative storage solution, you can easily use command strips to stick these to your walls damage free while making it easy for kiddos to reach in and grab what they’re looking for. Since I have so many rainbow colored legos, it was a no brainer to use these as both decor and storage.

More great tips and tricks

For even more great storage solutions follow some of my favorite accounts:

Follow Teaching by the Mountains for tips like this Maple & Lark zipper pouch organizer
Follow The Home Edit for great tips like arranging your books by rainbow color

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Today I finally got around to organizing Sofie’s closet. I’m a total sucker for a good rainbow theme these days so organizing her closet by color was so much fun. The main colors are bright pastel primaries which really bring the rainbow look to life. Sofie loves to shop from small mom owned brands and some of our absolute favorites are featured here:

Getting rid of old baby clothes and things she’s outgrown is so incredibly hard for me. Every little outfit is so full of memories. But when it is time to purge I love sending gently used items to ThredUP ( P.S. You can use this code to get $10 free /www.thredup.com/r/QYRWFV) because I hope they get a second lifetime.

step 1: Choose a color palette

it sounds so simple when you think about it — if you want a Pinterest perfect closet you need to plan a color scheme in advance. But most people accumulate items they love as they go and so the whole closet is a hodge pudge of various tones. Rainbow is a great theme for a kids closet because you really get the breadth of all of the fun kids colors. When Sofie was an infant though I did a completely monochromatic closet with some baby pink accents.
Okay so you’re probably thinking there’s no way you could stick to a strict pallet. There’s no way you could give up your son’s favorite red shirt or your daughters crazy purple birthday dress. Well the good news is you don’t have to! For those must have items that don’t fit into the closet color scheme, simply tuck them away in some stylish bins. This keeps the overall look uniform.

step 2: design your seasons

Another great way out of narrowing down the color palette is to pick two schemes. One for fall and winter and one for spring and summer. For fall I simply can’t resist natural muted earth tones and all of the brown, maroons, and dark mustard colors. But for spring and summer in all about the pastel bright rainbows. The key is just don’t mix and match. If you have two sides of the closet use one for each season. Or if not tuck away the past season in boxes — and if your kiddo is a toddler they’ve l likely outgrown last season anyway.

step 3: arrange your shelves

Sofie had a lot of Toddler Jammie’s and tops so I chose to hang those and use the shelves in between for leggings and shorts. But now that she’s old enough to pick out her own outfits, I recommend hanging matching bottoms and tops together so that they can easily choose something semi coordinated.

step 4: arrange by color

This is wear the rainbow magic begins! Start with red and darks moving to lighter shades and into the next color. You’ll have so much fun seeing the rainbow come to life. If you do a squint test and something sticks out, it’s probably the wrong color family or tone.

Okay so you’re probably thinking that’s great for solids but what about patterns and multi colors? We’ll as you can see in my photo Sofie def has some floral prints that I just love. I tend to tuck them strategically in between other items do they don’t stand out too much. But you can also gather then all at one end or the other or fuck them away in boxes. To get the overall effect you just have to make sure you don’t have too many outliers.

step 5: purchase items to fill in the gaps

It probably sounds crazy to shop for new items based on your closet color palette instead of what your kid really needs right now. But here’s the thing — adding this constraint into the equation made me a much better shopper. Instead of just buying the first thing you see that meets that cold morning need, it’ll force you to think about what color or pattern you need, what bottoms will match, and what place does it serve in the overall wardrobe. Doing this really helped me ensure I wasn’t just buying more to have more but actually making a thoughtful choice.

Oh and it works the other way too! The best excuse I had not to buy one more coral shirt, or that bright red valentines print was knowing that either that color spot was already taken or that bright red would mess up my whole aesthetic.

So it’s a brand new year and spring cleaning will be just around the corner. So don’t forget these five tips for a more organized and Pinterest-worthy closet as you start your annual organization efforts!