Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All my 5 yo wants to do is sort his LEGO. Thinks it’s great fun. Find a kid on the spectrum and they’ll probably do it for $100. Or let them choose a set at the end that they can take home.

If it were not sad it would be funny how you managed to roll a child labor, child abuse and taking advantage of a child
into one and sell it as fun.

How do you manage to extract all of that from a suggestion to turn a chore into an opportunity for a kids who might enjoy the task??

Between old and new sets (by old I mean the sets my own brother played with in the 70’s) we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 LEGO pieces. They are sorted into the following bins done mostly by DS: one bin for Lego people, one bin for a teeny tiny small pieces that always get lost, one bin of large pieces that make up roads etc. one bin of everything else. My son has the instructions he has kept from every Lego set he has received and built. Otherwise it’s just the jumble in bins. He has always had the most fun just creating from scratch. In fact, one year he asked for a box of doors and a box of windows to add to his collection. In my opinion, it’s not worth organizing more than we’ve done. It had always been hours of fun for DS while learning problem-solving.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All my 5 yo wants to do is sort his LEGO. Thinks it’s great fun. Find a kid on the spectrum and they’ll probably do it for $100. Or let them choose a set at the end that they can take home.

If it were not sad it would be funny how you managed to roll a child labor, child abuse and taking advantage of a child
into one and sell it as fun.

Well my kid genuinely enjoys it, sorts and resorts all his stuff repeatedly. Anytime I have something to sort, he begs to be allowed to do it. I know other kids (especially on the spectrum) who are similar. The gift is just a treat at the end to make it extra fun. Sorry that you find it offensive.

Anonymous wrote:OP, where are you located? If you are inside or just outside the Beltway, I will come do this for $10/hr for however long it takes.

And then for that money you will buy a whole big house in Bethesda because this is how much it will take to sort this stuff.

Anonymous wrote:All my 5 yo wants to do is sort his LEGO. Thinks it’s great fun. Find a kid on the spectrum and they’ll probably do it for $100. Or let them choose a set at the end that they can take home.

If it were not sad it would be funny how you managed to roll a child labor, child abuse and taking advantage of a child
into one and sell it as fun.

I don't get it.. the good Harry Potter set is only like 80 bucks..
https://www.ebay.com/itm/LEGO-Harry-Potter-75954-Wizarding-World-Hogwarts-Great-Hall-New-2018/273836983368?epid=20026498090&hash=item3fc1f4c448:g:qjwAAOSwvaBc0f4j

For what you have, to sort it you would need to pay someone at least 10 bucks per hour and so based on what someone else said, it took them a month.. so imagine 30 days, time 8 hours a day .. 240 hours, at 10 bucks per hour = 2400 Dollars.

You could literarily buy 30 sets of Lego each valued at 80 Dollars. Seriously? You are even thinking about this?
If it was my stuff, I would just save maybe three pounds of this for a kid to free play and free form build.
and the rest to the charity it goes. I would buy five sets at 80 bucks total of 400, for life and
that is that. For the rest.. gradual gifts from family or friends.

Solved.

All my 5 yo wants to do is sort his LEGO. Thinks it’s great fun. Find a kid on the spectrum and they’ll probably do it for $100. Or let them choose a set at the end that they can take home.

star wars, harry potter and other sets

Op, it would impossible to know, re: small pieces, most pieces, which set they belonged to. Impossible.

Anonymous wrote:I spent a lot of time sorting out our legos by color because it seemed like a good idea and it was a complete waste of time.

I did this too and my boys immediately messed them all up again. Now as long as they are all in a bin (or completed and displayed), I’m satisfied.

This sounds like an awesome summer paid project for a young teenager. If you’re on nextdoor I bet you would find interested kids in your area.

OP, where are you located? If you are inside or just outside the Beltway, I will come do this for $10/hr for however long it takes.

Anonymous wrote:Give your child the instructions and let him go digging for the pieces. Each set tells you the exact pieces that are needed. Your kid can find the pieces or substitute other pieces if he wants. That's on him. The reason they are in the current condition is that he made them, broke them, and they got tossed in bins.

Paying someone to organize Legos strikes me as over the top and the current state of our Lego collection is not good.

This. And if he can’t make the exact pieces he can make his own creations. Which I think are better anyway.

My DS is in his late 20s, but I take it they never did invent the Lego magnet or lego vacuum with auto-sorting built in, or a Lego robot.
Too bad.

My trick, and it did help, was the top of a very big refrigerator box, a great big sturdy shallow cardboard tray that was reinforced by heavy wire around the outside--held up for several years. All the little toys, including legos, went in it. It would slide under the bed at night.

I occasionally did sort all the legos and put them into a compartmented cabinet but that was in a hypnotic state and had nothing to do with the actual use of the things. If I'd had a girl, I would have been matching the Barbie shoes equally pointlessly.

It occurs to me something that would work like a murphy bed might be handy. It's not about organizing the legos IMO, it's about herding them.

If your child enough is old enough to play with the sets, he's old enough to sort them. Either he can handle them or he can't. And if he can't, off they go.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm really surprised no one has discussed this -

OP this is an opportunity for YOUR child to problem solve, develop grit, and overcome adversity.

Is this how you deal with every challenge he faces? Hire someone to take care of it?

the child is probably too young to sort it all out but he is too young to build the sets as well. several people pointed this out.

A 6 year old? Really?

My kid started building Minecraft sets at 5. The directions are pretty easy to follow. So yes, a 6 year old can build them. And it sounds like the child did build them, or at least someone did, if they are out of the box and mixed up and the family has the directions. If the child built them and then broke them, the child can sort them and rebuild.