Creative ways to store playground materials

I love to be outside – which is kind of a shock because when I was little the last thing that I wanted to do was play outside.  I need my daily dose of vitamin D, and my students need to run around and be crazy people.  It is so good for them to have the opportunity to just play – completely unstructured and in a wide open space, so we spend a lot of time outside.

The kiddos can only run around in circles for so long, so we’ve been introducing a lot of other activities into our outdoor space in order to help keep them busy.  Our playground is small, so it was really important for us to have storage for all of these activities that was aesthetically pleasing and didn’t take up a lot of space.  So we used these cute baskets!

I absolutely love how cute it turned out, and the kids love to go through the baskets and find little treasures to play with. Right now we have sidewalk chalk, tongs and tweezers, shaped ice cube trays, clear gems, decorative tiles, sea shells, polished rocks, twigs, plastic blocks, toy trucks, colored play dough lids, and manipulative bears in our baskets.  These items will be switched out regularly to keep things fresh. I can’t wait to see what the kiddos will create with them!