A homey classroom might have friendly, warm decor, while an professional classroom might stick to basic colors and a few educational posters. A calm classroom might be minimalist, while an energetic classroom might have bright colors and lots of posters.
Make sure your desk, bookshelves, and organizational furniture are placed so that they don’t get in the way of your desk arrangements. For example, you might put your desk at the front of the room so you can overlook the classroom and create authority, or you might put it in the back of the classroom to avoid intimidating your students. Putting it on the side might create a good balance between being visible to students and keeping them at ease.
Younger students often benefit from bright colors, fun shapes, and educational reminders. For example, you might put up multiplication charts. Middle school children might respond well to inspirational posters and a set up that allows them to be independent. High school students might not respond well to cutesy decor. Instead, a balance between homey and professional can work well for them.
If you teach older children, your entire room might reflect your subject. For instance, a history teacher might choose inspirational quotes from historical figures, and they might decorate their walls with different timelines. For younger students, you might create different areas of the room for each subject. Since they’ll be learning many subjects in one room, your classroom should reflect all that they’ll learn. For example, you might have a reading corner, a math wall, a word wall, a history timeline, and a science corner.
If you want a solid-colored cover, use a large roll of butcher paper. You can normally find butcher paper at the supermarket or craft store in white, brown, black, and occasionally seasonal colors like red, green, or yellow.
You can find colored masking tape and painter’s tape at most home improvement stores and craft stores. There’s also special crafting tape, called washi tape, that’s great for making borders and frames.
This is a great craft project to do with your students when the seasons change. You can update the decorations in your room and the students will be able to see their whirligig on display!
You can hang the banner above the doorway or even on your door. For more depth, you can cut larger circles out of a different color to “frame” the back of each circle. Don’t be afraid to make a few different banners for different times of the year, like “Happy fall!” or “Spring has sprung!”
For example, in a math classroom, you might have posters of the different equations that students will need to complete their problems. Make sure you cover these up during quizzes or exams, if necessary. This is especially important if the posters may contain answers. In a science classroom, you can hang up posters that demonstrate proper lab behaviors and lab rules.
If you teach English, you can hang up a wall of pictures with quotes from novels that you’ll be reading in class. In a chemistry class, you can put a poster of the Periodic Table of Elements at the front of the room, since you’ll likely be referencing it throughout the year.
This is a great icebreaker for younger children and can help them to feel more relaxed in your classroom, since they’ll have a reminder of something they love in the room.
Remember to prioritize classroom materials before decorations. Items like pencils, paper, books, and folders are much more important to your students’ success than colorful bulletin boards and posters. Often, the school will only provide a certain amount of these items, and the teacher will be required to purchase any additional items. Keep in mind that even with a small decorating budget, you can still make your classroom an exciting and welcoming environment for your students.
Some items, like holiday decorations, will go on sale right after the specific holiday is over. Head to the craft store a few days after the holiday has passed to get deals on themed decorations for next year!
For a more polished look, you can create little “frames” for the images by adding a construction paper background that creates a border around the picture. As another option, you can look for cheap frames at a local thrift store or at garage sales. For instance, if you teach a history class, you can print out black and white pictures of historical figures and hang them at the front of the classroom. Throughout the year, you can point to the various pictures as you talk about that figure. By the end of the year, you can ask your students to name all of the figures on the wall.
If you’re allowed to, take pictures of your class throughout the year as they work on projects and finish assignments. Then, print out the pictures and add them to the bulletin board for a “work in progress” section. Remember that you should never hang any assignments that contain grades on the papers.
Keep in mind that it’s normally cheaper to paint an old piece of furniture than buy a new one. However, you can sometimes find good deals in the clearance section of furniture stores.
For example, you can use empty mason jars to hold pencils, markers, and rulers on a student station. You can use old magazines and damaged books for making collages and decorations. Items like boxes and bins are great for adding storage to a smaller room without spending a lot of money.
For example, you can select yellow and white for your color scheme, and make your bulletin boards white with yellow trim. Then, you can add pops of yellow throughout the classroom to draw students’ attention to important items. If you teach biology, you might pick green and navy blue for your colors. Then, you can make one bulletin board green with blue trim and another blue with green trim. Pick posters that show images of trees, lakes, and other Earth-inspired images. You can also use your school’s colors as your room’s color scheme for an easy source of inspiration.
You can also put bathroom passes and sign-out sheets on this table so students can go here before using the restroom during class.
For example, you can make a crate labeled “Make Up Work,” and hang 5 folders inside of it labeled Monday-Friday. Then, throughout the week, put the extra papers from class activities in the corresponding folder so students who miss class can go there to gather their materials. If your class is reading a novel, you can put all of your class copies of the book in 1-2 crates at the front of the room so students can retrieve the books before they read in class. This will keep the books safe and in the same place.
For instance, you can put arts and crafts supplies on a bookshelf and ask students to retrieve them as needed. In an upper-level class, you can place supplemental sources and reference books on the shelves to encourage students to further their learning.
This also helps to reduce the amount of class time spent on passing out informational papers for students’ parents.
