Every teacher has a different goal when it comes to decorating their classroom; some want it to feel fun and exciting, and others want it to feel like a calm, relaxing space. This will totally depend on your personality and the needs of your class each year. If you’re looking to create a calm classroom, our classroom display packs can help you! Choose a design that makes you feel peaceful, and use the design and the colour palette as a basis for your classroom design. We’ve put a few tips together to help you decorate your classroom to create a calm space that’s ideal for learning.
Designs we suggest:
* Softly
Use one theme consistently
One way to create a calm classroom is to make sure the design is cohesive and consistent across the space. Depending on the needs of your class, you might find it works better to have different designs for different zones, or one design to unite the whole space. Our design packs feature the main design as well as a coordinating colour scheme, so you’ve got a whole design and colour palette ready to go. Our packs have everything you’ll need to decorate your classroom, including borders, labels, literacy and numeracy posters, lettering to use for titles, and lots more. This means that every element will fit with one another visually, which will create more of a sense of calm and consistency across the room. You’ll be able to edit all of the elements to create exactly what you need, so you can edit the labels to make sure you have one for every drawer or folder you’re labelling.
Think about your most viewed areas
What areas of your classroom are looked at by your students most often? This might be a particular board that has your current topic’s keywords, or a number line, or a notice board you often reference. You could choose to have a more gentle design for areas like this, like our Softly display pack. This will let the information speak for itself and be easy on the children’s eyes, so they can check the display often without a feeling of overstimulation, which might be better depending on the needs of your students. Or you could opt for a design like Moonlit Lake, which shows a calm scene, and focus on using block colours from the colour scheme for the main areas of information.
Create a calm transition into your classroom
Think carefully about how students enter your classroom – what’s the doorway like? What do they see as they walk into the room? What’s the first display board they’ll walk past? Use these spaces to create a calm, peaceful transition into your classroom. This could be by creating a border around your door, or utilising the first display board as a calm space. You could choose a design like Midnight Adventure, which has a whimsical feel with darker colours and give a feeling of fun but calm and quiet on entering the room. You could include affirmation posters (included in our display packs!) or posters showing some helpful strategies to calm down and get into the right headspace for learning, like square breathing.
Create a Calm Zone
You might have a little space or corner in your classroom that you use turn into a calm zone. This can be really helpful for things like emotional regulation, which can help with the children’s wellbeing and managing behaviour in a busy classroom. Depending on your needs of your students and the different children in your class each year, some years you may find this more helpful and want to set one up. Choose a calm design and use it exclusively in this area, to really show the boundaries of the zone and help the children feel like they’re entering a calm space that’s almost separate from the rest of the class. You could use soft furnishings like pillows and blankets in coordinating colours to the design you’ve chosen. Add affirmations and relevant posters, depending on your school’s behaviour policies. You could include a Zones of Regulation poster, or posters showing different feelings. Include anything children are free to use to regulate their feelings, like fidget toys. Spaces like this need clear expectations and will need some practice, but once your class knows how to use the space they can be really helpful and a great way for children to feel relaxed in your classroom.
We’d love to know your ideas for how to create a peaceful school classroom! Find our display packs here to choose your favourite design for your classroom.
