This is a guest post by Christie Burnett from Childhood 101
Storage ideas and solutions to ensure kid’s craft and art supplies can be easily accessed, used, and most importantly cleaned up!
Following my last guest post where I shared my top picks for creative supplies for kids, today I am sharing suggestions for finding a space to store those materials so that they are easy to access, use, and most importantly, clean up! Hope you can find some kids craft storage ideas that will suit you home.
1. Choosing a Storage Space
Your first task is to choose a storage space dedicated to your art and craft materials. Wherever possible I suggest choosing a space close to where your children spend most of their time creating. This space could be a cupboard, shelf, chest of drawers, trolley, or even a set of shoe storage pockets hanging over a door. Your art storage really doesn’t have to take up a lot of space.
2. Decide How Will You Manage Access
One thing that will help you to determine the best storage space for your materials is how accessible you want them to be to your children. It might be that you are more comfortable keeping a small number of everyday art making materials (eg. pencils, markers, paper) directly on or alongside a table or easel, or alternatively on a low shelf in your storage space. Supplies requiring a greater degree of adult assistance and/or closer supervision (eg. paint, clay, etc) should be stored out of reach. Keeping these supplies visible but not directly accessible allows your child to see that they are there but requires them to ask permission before using them.
3. Divide and Conquer
Once you have chosen your art storage space, I suggest dividing it into sections so that materials for each type of creative experience are stored together. I generally divide supplies into the following groups – drawing, painting, collage and gluing, sculpture and papers. Once you have sorted your materials dedicate one drawer, shelf, basket or tub to each type of material – for example, keeping all of your paint supplies together and separate from drawing or collage supplies. This will help you and your children to keep the materials organised on an ongoing basis. Kat shares her tips here for decluttering kids art supplies.
4. Be Choosy
As a result of our storage system, each time my children create I am able to simply pull out just the materials we need for the art experience we have planned. We don’t need to have everything available all at once, and thereby avoid total creative catastrophe due to everything being pulled out and things become unmanageable!
You can see a number of examples of how other families make their art space and storage work in this post – 9 Kids Art Space & Storage Ideas.
Pop back next month when Christie will share her tips for Managing The Mess of Art & Craft With Kids.
