Many children feel a lot of connection with nature, and find it really easy to relate to discussions about animals and the environment. Lots of schools are looking into eco-friendly living as part of the curriculum, and getting children involved with green and sustainable initiatives throughout the school. So you may be thinking about embracing these themes by bringing nature into your classroom! Having a nature-inspired classroom design can have a calming effect on students and help them to connect with the world around them. Here are a few ideas for how you can bring the outside in with natural displays in your classroom!
Designs we suggest:
* New Wave
Embrace the seasons
An element of the natural world that is really lovely to explore with children is seasonality, and how things change across the year. If nature is important in your classroom design, this can be a great way to incorporate it. It can also work well if the natural environment or eco-friendly living is a part of your curriculum, as it can keep nature in the students’ minds throughout the year and get them thinking about how nature is impacted by things like environment, weather, and season.
Try bringing this into your classroom by switching things up in your classroom design and your display boards. In the autumn, you could try our Golden Pine design to reflect autumnal colours and trees. You could buy flowers from the supermarket every few weeks, and talk about how you’ll see tulips in the shops in spring but not in autumn, and think about what flowers you can buy at different times of year.
Make a forest-inspired reading corner
If you’re lucky enough to have space for a reading corner or library in your classroom, it’s a great opportunity to do something exciting with your classroom design. Embrace a forest theme to create a nature-inspired area to have some calm reading time! Try our Secret Garden design pack, which is filled with green foliage. You could add shades of green with pillows and blankets for your reading area, and add a real plant or two. Use a design like Secret Garden (or Fairy Cove if you want more of a magical forest theme!) to create labels for shelves or baskets, to organise books by genre or reading level.
Incorporate different environments
A great way to get children thinking about nature is to discuss what you mean by nature and what different kinds of natural settings they can think of – forests, jungles, beaches. You could talk about biomes and different animals and plants you’ll find in different places. You could use our New Wave design to create a classroom display inspired by the ocean, which could work for a science or geography topic or just because you love the ocean! Use coordinating blue backing paper, or pick a yellow to turn it into a beach theme. The New Wave design works really nicely if you have a blue theme to your classroom, as many of the décor elements in the pack come in various shades of blue, incorporating the ocean design alongside solid colours.
Bring in natural materials
Try bringing nature into your classroom by…bringing nature into your classroom! You could get a plant that’s easy to look after, like a peace lily. Make sure you think about the spot you’ll be putting your plants in – do you have a sunny windowsill that’s perfect for a succulent, or is your classroom a bit darker? If so, you’ll need to find a plant that can handle living in the shade, like a fern or a snake plant. You can also use natural materials like hessian, which many teachers like to use as backing for a border, or incorporate wicker baskets for storage. Use little jars of shells as décor, or pick up some wooden coasters made from discs of real branches. You could even bring in dried flowers to hang up, as they’ll last longer than fresh ones! Look out for different things that come from the natural environment around you and think about how you can incorporate them into your classroom design.
Think about colour theory
Another way to incorporate nature into your classroom is to bring in colours that you’ll see in the natural environment, and you can use colour theory to inspire this with greens and earth tones. Colour theorists say that greens are associated with feelings of peace and promote relaxation, especially muted and natural shades, so you could try our Secret Garden display pack. Shades of brown in an earth tone theme are often seen as being warm, comforting, and reassuring, so you could incorporate our Fairy Cove or Golden Pine design into your classroom. If you want to use nature to create a calming environment for learning in your classroom, greens and earth tones are a great place to start, and you could look into colour theory to decide which colours you want to use.
These are just a few ways to create an inspiring and calming classroom with nature! Find our display packs here to choose your favourite design for your classroom.
