Class Environment: Decorate your way to Academic Success!

It’s been a little while since I last wrote and shared things about my classroom, but I’m finally in my new classroom for the year!

This year in particular, I spent a lot of time thinking about what would be the best way to use and decorate my space for the students. I try to be intentional in decorating my room so it allows for academic success.

Particularly, being a teacher of second-language learners, I always try to make sure that the decorations and setups I choose are very visual.

In light of all of this, I wanted to share some of my best advice with you for decorating your classroom this year.

 I always try to make sure that the decorations and setups I choose are very visual. Language-learning is often more geared to visual (and auditory) learners, so this is the thinking behind my decisions.

Before we get onto the tips, though, I should put out a disclaimer, loud and clear: all of the tips I am about to give and the topics I’m going to cover work differently for everyone!

I for one have worked with different teachers and in different sets of environments; I have seen different classroom set-ups work in different International schools!

The two new ideas I’m putting in place this year are:

• Labelled Containers
• Working Boards

I hope mine provide some inspiration for you!

1. Labelled Containers

These are super practical. They are really great for storing everything from pencils and crayons, to pieces of work and bits and bobs that get left around the classroom.

They keep the classroom tidy and ensure that everything has its place and is in order. No more excuses for messy work environments! A tidy space means a tidy, organised mind, and that means great academic achievement!

Labelling the containers helps the children to recognise and remember that everything has its own place. It makes them accountable for putting things in the right place so that the class is kept organised.

Why not get the children to label them in alphabetical order? This could make a fun and productive exercise!

Some ideas of how you might want to use labelled containers:

• For students to keep their packed lunches.
• For students to keep their work.
• To store messy arts and crafts materials like glue, sequins, glitter and scissors.
• In lessons, to categorize objects.

I like to think that I am a very organised teacher as I am still in a process of labelling my containers, which takes time and which I like to savour!

2. Working Boards

Working boards work wonders for the visual learners in your class. And as a language teacher, they can be priceless when it comes to presenting grammatical concepts in a way the students can remember!

Whether it’s interactive verb tables or mindmaps of related vocabulary (for example, vocabulary related to the topics ‘what’s in my pencil case’ or ‘shops in a town’), don’t underestimate the working board’s value!

Wanting to make sure that my classroom is a student working place and not a teacher working space, I decided to keep things quite fun and interactive. Here are some ideas of how you could use working boards in your classroom:

A weather working board.
Make a title that says ‘today’s weather is…’ and then some laminated labels with bluetack on the back with all the different possible endings to this sentence.

Once you’ve made your labels, get your students to draw a picture on them to match the word. Then every morning you’ve got an icebreaker activity, where your students can change the workboard according to the weather!

A date working board.
The same concept as above, but this time with today’s date. You’ll need a label for each day of the week, labels for all the ordinal numbers up to 31, and a label for each month of the year!

A timetable working board.
Transform your working board into a timetable! Create a table with 8 rows and as many columns as your students have lessons in a day, plus one.

Write the days of the week in the furthest left column starting in the second row from the top.

Then write the lesson periods (e.g. 9am-10am, 10am-11am etc) along the top row, one in each column.

Finally make labels for each subject in the students’ curriculum, and mix and match them into the table each day to present today’s schedule!

So, I hope these ideas have been very useful to you! In my next article, I will bring in differentiated lessons and some useful links I have created for the students!

Stay tuned for my next article, and in the meantime, happy decorating!