• Gather your assets

• Generate the label with Microsoft Office Word

• Print and stick

With my toddlers, I quickly realized a mostly tidy play room always ended up looking like a toy factory had exploded. While you might look at picking up and putting away toys and games as an aerobic exercise, I found a way to avoid the mess altogether. I use Microsoft Office Word, clip art, and digital pictures to help my toddlers find toys, and better yet, put them away, even though they were too young to read. Here is an example:

A sheet of labels in Word ready to print. View a larger image.

Gather your stuff

Start by getting your containers together. I used a couple of inexpensive low shelves with sliding plastic buckets that the kids could pull out and take with them to play. You could also use plastic containers with lids, but smaller children may have difficulty opening them. Once you have your containers together, think about what label size you should use and count up how many you will need. For example, for our sliding plastic buckets, I had to make sure one label was on the shelf and another on each bucket so the child could easily identify which bucket goes where.

You can search Office Online for the right size label template and design you want. (See the Generate the label with Microsoft Office Word section below to learn more about using the template.) Label manufacturers usually assign a unique number to each type of label, so you should note the brand and label number before you buy. These labels come in a myriad of sizes, shapes, and colors, and are inserted into your printer's paper tray.

Now, the fun part: what to put on the labels. I took digital pictures of each of my twin daughters holding an object, so the labels told each girl what was in each bin and to whom each item belonged. For the items that the girls shared, I used clip art from Office Online to simply show what was in the bin.

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Generating labels with Microsoft Office Word

Office Online includes templates for many popular brands of stickers and labels. These templates help you line up the text, clip art, and photos just right so that they print just where you want them on the labels. Here are the steps you can take to create great-looking labels for your non-readers:

1. Choose a template.  Visit the Office Online Template Gallery to choose a label template. There are many beautifully designed labels available, but for this task I like to use the blank ones because I plan to insert digital pictures and clip art.
2. Download the template.  Follow the instructions on Office Online to download the template. It is added to the document templates folder on your computer, and a new document opens with the template loaded, as illustrated here:

   A label template in Microsoft Office Word. View a larger image.

3. Save the template.  Like a lot of mothers, I get interrupted a lot. I just click the Save button after each interruption.
4. Change the text.  It's a great idea to use text in addition to pictures to help early readers get accustomed to letters.
5. Add clip art.  The Office Online Clip Art Gallery includes thousands of pieces of clip art to use in this project. While editing the template in Office Word, I simply click where I want the artwork to go, and then insert a picture as clip art.
6. Add digital photos.  I click where I want a digital picture to go, and then insert a photo into the template. Because photo file are often huge (in file size and screen size), I always click and drag to resize the photos, and I often use Word's cropping tools to focus in on just the part of the photo I want to use. To access Word picture editing and cropping tools, simply click on the photo and the Picture Tools tab appears. When you click off the photo, the tab disappears. (In Word 2003, point to the View menu, then point to Toolbars, and then click Pictures to access picture editing tools.)
7. Save again.  I save the labels, because let's face it — kids like to pick at things, and sometimes that means your labels need to be replaced. Once I have set up and saved my labels, I can reprint them whenever my toddlers act like, well, toddlers.

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Print and stick

Now that your label masterpieces have been created, it is time to print them. Because I do not like to waste anything, I usually take a quick photocopy of a label sheet, then put it in my printer's paper tray, and then try printing a single page of labels on it. If you are better than I am at figuring out which side of the sheet to print on and which direction the paper goes in the tray, then you can skip this step and go straight to printing on the real labels. You and your children can work together to put the labels on their containers, and you can talk about how they can be in charge of their toys. With gentle but consistent reinforcement, maybe your new label system will help your toddlers give you time to go to the gym for your aerobic exercise instead of cleaning the kids' play room.

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