Getting Organized by Color Coding Your Kids!

I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this before but this seems to be something that a lot of people are just now figuring out. We’ve been using this system for a while now… even before I started blogging! A lot of these pictures are from a previous house that we lived in but they show the way we started out with our color code adventure and some of the organization that we had. This post was actually started almost 2 years ago… I’ve been trying to go through some of the posts that have been overlooked and forgotten about.

When you have a pile of kids like we do then things can get really crazy, really fast. That’s what happened to me when we added 3 kids to my 4 all at one time… complete CHAOS. Thankfully, I had the older kiddos pretty set with their routines and they were such a GREAT HELP with the younger ones but then when we added 2 more kids to the pile it got CRAZY again but thanks to this little ‘HACK’ it didn’t stay crazy for too long.

What did we change?

We assigned a ‘color’ to each child and then I tried to color coordinate most of their items with this chosen color. To start with I gave each kiddo a cup in their color. They kept these cups at the kitchen sink for water and such and they used that one cup all day. I already had these cups** so that was the colors we originally picked from. When the cups were washed they were put back in the little bin so we no longer had a billion cups lying all over the house.

I soon realized that this little HACK worked wonders and I began to use the colors for everything from school supplies to backpacks to towels, hair brushes and toothbrushes for them. I wasn’t constantly asking who something belonged to as I could see the color and know instantly who it belonged to.

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Another change we made

We also consolidated all the toys into ONE area! This helped so MUCH. The bedrooms had their beds and clothes. The older kids had a few other things in their rooms but the littles had beds and clothes and the closets were locked because a couple of them liked to tear EVERYTHING out of the dressers and closets EVERY SINGLE DAY! They would make a HUGE pile of clothes and toys in the middle of the room and we would spend HOURS sorting and folding it all out again. So, I moved the dresser to the closet and the toys to the ‘playroom’. We were BLESSED to have a second living room off the kitchen that we used as the playroom as I had a large baby gate to keep them contained in there.

I didn’t know about MINIMALISM at this time but I did go through a lot of their toys and got rid of so many. It made LIFE so much easier for everyone as we only had one room that needed TIDIED every day and the kids quickly learned where EVERYTHING went and they were able to help keep it STRAIGHTENED. We were able to keep the rest of the house nice and neat and if the ‘playroom’ was a mess it wasn’t such a big deal anymore as we weren’t constantly tripping over toys or stepping on LEGOS.

We will be doing this again soon as we have been in the process of reorganizing our new home and I often think of how we had this set up before. I miss the organization that I had in this house but I am hoping to get it back in this house.

Do we still use this HACK?

Yes! It has become an everyday way of life here and it keeps down so much confusion. We use color coding for their everyday items like drink tumblers, cubby baskets, and even their electric toothbrushes. We even use this hack for school supplies and such. Each kiddo gets a white binder to put their school work in but they use a colored paper in the front of the binder and they have a colored pencil pouch as well as colored folders to match. They each have a colored bin as well to make it easy to put things away.

This also makes it easier if we find something that needs to be put away… I can tell someone to put this in the green bin or the blue bin. It’s so SIMPLE that the 3-year-old has the colors down and she can put away everybody’s things as well by matching the items to the color of the bin.

We’ve also been able to use the color coding system for our Homeschool apps and things like Khan Academy and Easy PeasyAll In One Homeschool. If I can’t choose the color then I will include the color name in the username as we don’t use their real names for online accounts.

Any Problems?

The biggest problem we have had is that we can’t always find the items in the colors we need… sometimes we will use some colored contact paper, rubber bands, or tape to help color code the items or we just ‘deal’ with it and eventually we learn who the items belong to.

The other problem we ran into was when we joined families together and some of the ‘new’ kiddos wanted a color that someone else already had. Trades have been made in some areas and others were just changed to avoid confusion. It does take a little time to get other family members accustomed to this but we don’t stress too much if someone gets something in a color that isn’t ‘theirs’ because those things happen.

You can see some examples of this in the latest room makeovers that we’ve completed. (Some of the cubby boxes aren’t the chosen colors but the kids picked out colors to go with the theme of their room and they each have a color for their belongings.)

The boys do have their colors in their closet area although two of them switched the cubby bins around but they didn’t want to switch drink tumblers and school bins… they want to CONFUSE me!