Whether you’re a new teacher decorating your first classroom, you’re starting at a new school, or you’ve been assigned a new room, organising and decorating a new classroom from scratch can be a daunting task. We’re here to help you prepare your new classroom for the school year, with five tips to get you started and help you plan out your new classroom!
Take photos
Many teachers use the last few days of the summer holidays to get prepared, and this could be really helpful if you’ve got a new classroom to decorate. There often isn’t very much time assigned to get classrooms ready to go for a new school year, so it can be really helpful to come in with a game plan. So if you can, take photos of your new classroom so you can refer to them and plan out what is going to go where. Photos can be a useful way to get a sense of a new space, especially if you’re not going to have access to that space for a while. Print out your photos and scribble all over them – point out what you’re going to put where or even draw out your displays. All this planning will mean that when you set foot in your new classroom, the organising and decorating will go more smoothly and quickly since you’ve already got a plan.
Inventory your supplies
It can be tricky knowing what you’re going to have in your new classroom, both in terms of physical furniture and in terms of essential supplies like scissors and whiteboards. If you can, have a good look around and take note of what you’ve got to work with. This will help you to organise everything since you’ll have an idea of what kind of storage areas you’ll need, and you can start to think about some of the routines you’d like to put in place. When your class needs to use scissors, will you hand them out yourself (so store them tucked away near to you) or will the children help themselves and then return them when they’re finished (so store them somewhere accessible for the children). Knowing what you have will also tell you what you don’t have, so you won’t get caught out looking for something you need that isn’t there!
Pick a theme
We all want our classrooms to look lovely – after all, we have to spend many hours there every single day! But making things look nice can take a long time, especially if you’re changing up displays throughout the school year so you’re always creating new things. Picking a theme can be a real time-saver, since a lot of the decision making about things like colours and fonts is done for you, and anytime you make something new you'll already know roughly what it should look like to match what you’ve got already. This is where our Display Packs come in handy! Our packs contain everything you’ll need to decorate and organise your new classroom, like borders, bunting, posters, and all kinds of labels, so you can edit them to say exactly what you need and then print them out – ready made classroom décor! Just pick a theme you like and you’re ready to go – have a look at our Display Packs here.
Check your display policy
Every school has a different policy and different expectations when it comes to how classrooms should look. Speak with a member of SLT or a colleague to see if there are any essentials when it comes to displays – for example, does the school require you to have a book recommendation display to encourage a love of reading? Do they require things to be double mounted? (Our sympathies!). Make sure, before you get planning, that you’re ticking all the boxes required of you. You don’t want to work on your classroom only to find out later you need to make changes that’ll just take more time.
Prioritise the essentials
A classroom is a work in progress! You’ll be changing things, updating areas, and making new displays throughout the year. So when you’re planning your new classroom, think about the essentials that you’ll want from day 1. If you’re working in KS1, maybe you’ll want a display of number posters that children can use all through the year as their work on their number skills. Maybe you want to have an area for some topic key words, so that children can always refer to these spellings while you’re working through that topic unit. You could design the display so that most of it stays the same all year, but the words within it change when you start a new topic. Start with these basics that will be helpful to students and will get a lot of use during the school year, and go from there.
To all the teachers decorating a new classroom, good luck! And to those of you who are staying in your classroom and just giving it a bit of a refresh for a new school year, stay tuned for another blog post soon with some tips for you!
