Especially For Those Who Work With Kids!

I’m a Speech-Language Pathologist + work primarily with younger children in the private practice setting. For speech and language therapy, especially articulation therapy, we often use games as a cooperative strategy to keep children engaged and motivated. As you can probably imagine, it’s easy for things to get strewn about and cluttered. Our materials room + office shelves can become a disaster very quickly. We typically see clients back-to-back and we rarely have time to put things back neatly. I wanted to come up with a way to organize our shelves where they were not only pretty, but also functional. I’m obsessed with The Home Edit and recently watched an episode from their Netflix show where they organized a classroom + a playroom. They implemented their signature rainbow color scheme which is perfect for any kids space! So naturally, I decided to organize games and books using their ROYGBIV method. It’s aesthetically pleasing and much easier to keep things organized using this method. Not to mention, it’s just as easy for kids to know where things go + put them back in the appropriate space!

One day, I had a couple of clients out for vacation so I used that extra time to organize the game shelves in our materials room. It took only 45 minutes to an hour to complete the project. I regret not taking a before picture but I’ll give you an idea: we had games stacked horizontally and there were a few straggling pieces that didn’t make it into their boxes laying around on the shelves. We have tons of games and many were stacked in front of each other so we couldn’t really see all of the games we had. I decided to organize them vertically, as you would typically organize books. I taped the boxes that were falling apart back together to ensure pieces wouldn’t escape their proper space. Now, we can see most all of our games at a quick glance and they are much more accessible than before! Check out our office materials room below – pictured left!

For my personal office shelves + personal materials, pictured right, I implemented the same method. I don’t have near the number of games so this mini-project took about 10-15 minutes to complete. I was able to do this on my lunch break one day + still had plenty of time to eat.

As I mentioned, sometimes things get hectic and pieces are easy to lose. There is nothing worse than losing pieces to your client’s favorite game, so I keep all game pieces + parts in ziplock bags and I keep playing cards together using a rubber band. One thing I’ve noticed I haven’t really had to do is tell my clients to put the pieces back into the ziplock bags during clean up. More often than not, the kids will put things back as they were prior to using them. Shocking, I know!

So not only is this useful for organizing, but it’s a great way to teach kids organizing strategies + responsiblity, whether that be through modeling or as a speech therapy room rule.

As a side note, all of my clients LOVE the Greedy Granny game! I’ve had it for about 6 months and they continue to choose that game over most others, even from the giant selection in our materials room! If you’re in search of fun kids games, I highly recommend Greedy Granny!

For links to some of my favorite materials, check out my Amazon Storefront here!