What steps to do in training 'put your toys away'?

Well we're currently wanting to train alfie to put his toys away in a drawer, we've trained him to open and shut the drawer but we're having trouble with the picking things up and dropping it in bit :P

He will pick something up if I say 'get it' and gesture towards whatever it is, but he drops it straight away and we're not sure how to make him keep it in his mouth a bit longer, and get the the stage where he'll carry it to the drawer and drop it in.

Any ideas how to break it down? We use clickers with him, we trained the open/shut bit in steps, looking at the drawer, touching it, pushing it, etc... and he seemed to get it quite quickly so similar methods should work well.

Thanks

Back chain! Start with the toy in the draw with the draw open, when he puts his head in the draw, click and throw the treat in the draw, do this a few times, then withhold the click until he puts his mouth on the toy, then click/treat this a few times, then withhold the click until he picks it up when he's doing that well you can then put the toy outside the drawer and see if he'll pick it up and put it back in the drawer, then move the toy further away. If at any stage he doesn't get it go back a step.
(as he already knows how to shut the draw and he may just think it's shutting the draw maymbe start somewhere else like a bucket and once he gets the idea with a bucket go back to the drawer).

I taught mine to do this without a clicker.

I assume he knows 'fetch' first?

Ours also knew 'fetch bally' or 'fetch ropey' and other individual toys first. They don't always get it right, nor does it matter it's just a bit of fun but it did make it easier to train 'putting away'.

He also needs to know 'drop'.

What I did was ask the dog to 'fetch bally' and stand by their toybin/box. I held a treat over the box and as the dog moved their head over the box towards the treat I asked them to 'drop' and the toy fell into the box and they got the treat.

After they got the hang of this I introduced the command, 'tidy up'. I like to introduce the command AFTER they have learnt the behaviour and are at the stage where they getting it right more times than getting it wrong. This is so they don't associate the command with doing it wrong. It's how I teach them as pups too, I don't actually say 'sit' until they start to get the idea and perform the sit the majority of times I hold a treat to their nose.

Hope that helps or gives you some ideas!

I taught this as TBBS stated. Once the dog got the idea of putting object in the desired location (piece of paper and the toy bin in our case), I went on to train individual toy items to be tidied. It is a fun little 'game' to play and certainly keeps Bodie mentally enriched for a while