From planning to execution, decorating your first classroom can be an exciting experience. While you may be bursting with ideas to try out, it’s important to remember that research has shown that your classroom decorations can significantly impact your students’ attention and learning skills. As fun as decorating can be, it’s also vital to cognitive abilities, so you have to strike a balance.
Here are six tips for decorating your elementary school classroom:
- Browse through classroom decor themes and make a choice.
- Adapt your chosen theme to the specifics of your classroom.
- Create a preliminary decoration plan and budget.
- Minimize your decoration budget with funding alternatives.
- Shop for consumable items and borrow reusable ones.
- Make a fun task of setting up your décor.
You might feel like there’s so much to do to set up your classroom, but these tips will help you do it in no time! Let’s dive into how to use these tools to create the fun and conducive classroom of your dreams.
1. Browse Through Classroom Decor Themes and Make a Choice
The first step on the journey to decorating your classroom is choosing a theme for the decor you’ll be planning. A classroom theme defines the central idea of its decorations and the effect you intend for your classroom to have on the students and visitors that step into it. It also helps you define how to incorporate functionality and organization into the decorative work of the classroom.
It can be pretty tempting to assume that you can skip planning a theme and trying to get your classroom together on the fly, but that’s not always a very good idea. If you opt for planning without a set theme, it’s quite likely that you’ll end up with mismatched items, miss out on some crucial parts of the decoration, or even overcrowd the classroom.
You can choose to use a ready-made classroom theme or stir your creative juices and create one of your own.
Here are a bunch of fantastic ideas for classroom themes you can choose from:
- Jungle/Safari
- Beach
- Underwater
- Books
- Plant/Tree
- Farmhouse
- History
- Fruits
- Rainbow
- Pets
- Sky
- Legos
- Camp
- Fairytale
You can choose anything to center your classroom decor around or opt for a color scheme or simple palette instead. For more ideas, you can browse through Instagram and Pinterest to see what other elementary teachers are doing with their classrooms.
As you browse for a theme, remember to keep class organization and the needs of your students at the forefront. A well-decorated class is only useful to the extent it helps your student.
As Edutopia advises
, the most practical choice for them is a flexible theme that leaves twenty to fifty percent of the wall space clear. It’s also a great idea to maximize your classroom’s lighting, paint color, and seating arrangement while choosing a theme.
When you decide on a theme, it helps to have a classroom theme planner and organizer to iron out the finer details of how to implement it. There are a ton of tools at your disposal to make the process easier, so working on your classroom theme doesn’t have to be taxing!
2. Adapt Your Chosen Theme to the Specifics of Your Classroom
Each classroom is unique, so it’s not always possible for every part of your chosen theme to fit perfectly into your classroom structure. After choosing an ideal decoration theme, the next step is to turn it into a realistic one. Let’s dive into the steps for putting the right twist on your chosen classroom theme.
Study the Classroom Carefully
The first step to fusing an ideal theme with the reality of your classroom is to understand both parts. While studying your classroom, it helps to measure the dimensions of the room. To avoid being tempted to plaster all of the wall and floor space with decorations, map out the area and decide what parts you’ll be willing to leave bare.
Fuse the Decorations With the Seating Arrangements
An ideal classroom decoration should be student-focused. This means that their seating arrangement should interact with the decoration in a way that makes the classroom more inviting and inspires creativity without becoming a distraction in itself.
For example, if the most attractive part of the setting in your theme would end up in the direct view of the students, there’s a high chance that it’ll affect their ability to concentrate. You can adapt to that by shifting the positions of the decorations or seating arrangements.
Create a Custom Color Scheme
Colors have a profound impact on human psychology. With young students who have less ability to resist their effects, research has shown that colors can have an even stronger effect. The sights of most children are still developing during elementary school until they’re about ten years old. Though certain colors may fit your theme pattern best, it’s important to be sensitive when choosing the colors that will surround them during lengthy school hours.
A good color choice will minimize the physical and mental strain on the eyesight and emotions of your students, ultimately helping them learn better. If you need to include some changes in the color scheme of your decorations, you can explore different methods. In a case where you have a similar color more suitable than the one that needs replacing, you can simply paint over it. Otherwise, you may have to consider choosing a new theme altogether.
You can visualize your changes with tools like Visualize Color or FloorPlanner to look over the possible product before changing it. To understand how colors can affect your students, here is an overview of the effects of color choices.
Red
Red attracts attention and stimulates visual activity. It is one of the most dominant colors, so it helps to accentuate the detail in your decorations. However, it’s best to avoid using a lot of plain red, especially in the line of students’ direct sight.
If you’re aware of any tense or hyperactive students in your class, it’s best to keep red to a minimum to avoid aggravating them. In a case where it’s absolutely necessary to use a large amount of red, you can mix it in with some white to create a more pacifist pink or add some yellow to make orange.
Brown
Brown stimulates a connection to the earth and feelings of reliability. It is a much warmer alternative to an entirely dark color because it also contains some red and yellow, making it easier on the eyes. Dark shades of brown can serve as a softer alternative to a stronger tone like black.
Yellow
Yellow is a warm color that inspires feelings of serenity in most students. It is an excellent representation of daylight, so it’s more likely to create serene feelings. Yellow can be stressful on the eyes when used in excess. Otherwise, it strikes an excellent balance with darker colors.
Blue
Blue creates an atmosphere of ease and calmness. It’s an age-old favorite to use around children because it stimulates a relaxing coolness similar to the effect of running water. A single shade of plain blue can get quite dull, but this color has many shades you can experiment with to create a fantastic balance.
Purple
Purple is a mixture of red and blue that perfectly balances the qualities of both in its various shades. It’s ideal for use around elementary students because you can use it to stimulate creativity while giving a sense of coolness. While you can use purple liberally, it’s best to exercise the same restraint with other colors to avoid being monotonous.
Green
Green combines the calming qualities of blue and yellow mixed into it with its similarity to plush vegetation to evoke feelings of tranquility. The rod cells of the retina absorb blue-green colors most strongly, so green is often said to be the most relaxing color. Green decorations will be particularly effective for tense or anxious students.
3. Create a Preliminary Decoration Plan and Budget
Having an endless supply of money to work on decorations for your first classroom would be fantastic, but that’s hardly ever realistic. That’s okay, though, because a great plan and proper budgeting can help you create the classroom of your dreams without breaking the bank!
Here are some great tips on how to create a decoration budget for your classroom:
- Make a list of needed items. As soon as you settle on a theme, the next step to decorating your classroom on a budget is to list all the items you’ll need. It’s most likely that you’ll keep remembering things on the fly while making this list, but there’s nothing to worry about if it turns out a little chaotic because you’ll recreate an organized version of it later on.
- Organize your list. When you have every item listed, reorganize them either based on their categories or in order of importance. It also helps to differentiate between things that are absolutely necessary from those you can do without.
- Keep alternatives in mind. You may not have to buy every item yourself, but it’s often best to create a ‘worst-case scenario’ budget to estimate the cost of everything you don’t have. For each item, list out possible ways to get it and a short note on how you can explore those ways.
- Create a preliminary budget. When you have all your decoration needs and wants listed in the proper order, you can then arrange them into a budget style and start scouting for prices. It’s best not to limit yourself while doing price research. You can check as many stores and vendors as possible to estimate the best cost with decent quality.
- Estimate the total cost. It can be much easier to figure out what plans you can or cannot implement when you can put a figure to everything you need. If the final cost isn’t a figure you can conveniently afford, don’t worry about that. The essence of a full budget is to trim it down to necessities.
- Make budget cuts. The best point to start your budget cuts is from items that are expensive yet low on the scale of importance. You can take them off the list of things you can purchase on your own. If they can truly add value to your classroom decorations, you shouldn’t completely do away with the possibility of using them. Instead, you can start to explore alternative ways to get these items.
4. Minimize Your Decoration Budget With Funding Alternatives
There are alternative ways for you to get your classroom decoration needs without paying out of your own pocket. If your budget seems to be beyond your financial capacity, you can explore these options.
Donations
This is one of the most common ways of sourcing for items to decorate your classroom. When sourcing for donations, you get to explore the high possibility that someone out there has what you need and doesn’t need it.
The different ways you can request donations towards decorating your first classroom include:
- Creating and distributing a physical or virtual Donors Choose request form.
- Appealing to decorators around you to donate essential items.
- Speaking to family and friends to donate items or cash.
- Sharing your classroom decoration plan on social media to request donations.
- Reaching out to a community of teachers to get reusable classroom decorations.
Grant Applications
Applying for a grant to decorate your classroom may seem overboard, but it can help you get the larger amounts of the money or items you need from a single source. You’ll have to write a proposal detailing the essential aspects of decorating your classroom.
The most important questions this proposal should answer are:
- Why do you need to decorate your classroom?
- How do you intend to decorate your classroom?
- How much will it cost to decorate your classroom?
- Why can you not afford to decorate your classroom on your own?
- How will your decorated classroom aid learning for your students?
- Why do you deserve the grant?
With a proposal that briefly answers these questions, you can get the funding you need to go all out with your classroom!
Student Work
You can bypass the need for funding by exploring decoration alternatives that won’t cost you a cent. A popular one of those alternatives is using some of your decoration space to showcase student work. Aside from serving as a free decoration alternative, displaying student work can have many benefits for your students.
These benefits include:
- Creating a sense of responsibility in students.
- Improving students’ social skills.
- Nurturing creativity and confidence in students.
- Building the feeling of class community and representation in students.
- Creating a cheap, efficient, and meaningful system for rewarding students’ efforts.
DIY Design Projects
You could also wake up your inner creative genius and take your design into your own hands! This option isn’t entirely free, but it’s often much less costly than using store-bought decorations for your entire project.
Examples of do-it-yourself design projects you can explore are:
- Shower-curtain art.
- Wrapping-paper art.
- Writing murals.
- Enlarged prints made into posters.
- A self-made printed or painted design.
You can explore fantastic ideas that other teachers have used in decorating their classrooms on a budget using Building Book Love’s Classroom Design challenge.
5. Shop for Consumable Items and Borrow Reusable Ones
Now that you know everything you need to decorate your first classroom and how much each item should cost you, it’s time to go shopping!
A great way to save money when shopping for classroom decorations is to set up notifications on physical and virtual marketplaces. This way, you get to be one of the first to know about a sale, and you can take advantage of any discounts to use every dollar of your budget even better. You can also explore dollar stores and yard sales for great pre-used items.
Another helpful idea is to remain open to borrowing items, especially when they can be reused. You don’t have to purchase handy tools like step-ladders or paint-rollers or lug them all the way from home if you can borrow from someone nearby.
You can find out about all the great places to get your classroom decorating needs on a budget and what to buy from each store from this video by teachers at Happily Ever Elementary.
6. Make a Fun Task of Setting Up Your Décor
Implementing the hard work you’ve put into planning and gathering decorations for your first classroom is the icing on the cake! Transitioning from planning to hands-on decorating can seem overwhelming, but the task is much better when you make it fun. A popular idea for spicing up the process of decorating your first classroom is to share it on social media.
Involving your fellow teachers, family, and friends can also help to keep you motivated. If you encounter a problem while setting up your amazing first classroom, don’t hesitate to ask for help.
Conclusion
You now have all you need to do a fantastic job of decorating your first classroom! However, decorations take up a fair amount of space. In a small classroom, the difference in free space could make the environment look stuffy.
A hack for this problem is to move out unnecessary furniture, starting with the teacher’s desk, and reset the seating arrangements. Your classroom will look spacious and beautifully decorated in no time!