Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My 6 yo is lego-obsessed and is into putting together his own creations as well as more advanced sets. I'm in the midst our own lego organizing project and here's what I've done:

- decided to sort by type vs color

- found printable labels on pinterest and labeled drawers on a couple of those rubbermaid plastic drawer units

- covered the top of our old, unused train table with lego base units (looks kind of like this http://www.gracegigglesandnaptime.com/make-lego-table/)

- repurposed a plastic expandable file for instruction booklets

- dumped all pieces to be organized in a basket that goes under the table

Now it's my son's job to spend a little time each day sorting the pieces in the basket into the drawers. He likes doing this (but not as much as building), and it was only a couple hours upfront work for me. He's already using the sorted pieces to make new creations, and putting unused pieces back in the basket to be sorted again. I got a ton of ideas from pinterest. Next I plan to take an old ikea leaning bookshelf and put base plates on the shelves so he can have a rotating display in his room.

I also have a Lego obsessed kid and I would tell other people to skip the baseplates. It’s not necessary.
It’s nice to have a little lip to the table and shelves so small pieces don’t go flying, but my son doesn’t snap his creations down to the base plates - at all. We have them, but he is not interested and feels it restricts his play. It looks nice on Pinterest but so don’t think it’s very useful other than making you look like a crafty mom who has Pinterest.

Anonymous wrote:My 6 yo is lego-obsessed and is into putting together his own creations as well as more advanced sets. I'm in the midst our own lego organizing project and here's what I've done:

- decided to sort by type vs color

- found printable labels on pinterest and labeled drawers on a couple of those rubbermaid plastic drawer units

- covered the top of our old, unused train table with lego base units (looks kind of like this http://www.gracegigglesandnaptime.com/make-lego-table/)

- repurposed a plastic expandable file for instruction booklets

- dumped all pieces to be organized in a basket that goes under the table

Now it's my son's job to spend a little time each day sorting the pieces in the basket into the drawers. He likes doing this (but not as much as building), and it was only a couple hours upfront work for me. He's already using the sorted pieces to make new creations, and putting unused pieces back in the basket to be sorted again. I got a ton of ideas from pinterest. Next I plan to take an old ikea leaning bookshelf and put base plates on the shelves so he can have a rotating display in his room.

Anonymous wrote:My 4 (almost 5) yr old likes to take apart and rebuild his sets. He has rebuilt the 1900 piece Saturn V rocket 3 times.

He takes the page in the back of the instructions with the pieces listed and sorts and organizes them before building. We gave him an old thrift store coffee table in the basement since a large set could take several days.

If my kid can do it, so can yours.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the huge lego sets are going to be too hard for a 6yo to put together. They are way too complicated, even if you sorted them completely.

+1
when your son is old enough to build the sets he will be old enough to sort them. leave it as is and wait for him to grow up a little.

Anonymous wrote: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:

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??