Classroom setup is an important aspect of early childhood education. When setting up your room, it is important for the room to look welcoming. A welcoming early childhood classroom looks organized, colorful, is practical, and student centered. It is important for the room to flow well. What I mean by that is everything should be located in areas that make moving around the room easy to do and goes with the flow of student traffic. In my current kindergarten classroom, when you enter the room, the students cubbies are in almost a square formation which I call the “cubby house”. It is helpful to have all of my students belongings in one area right when you walk in as it is the first place they go when the enter the room and the last place they go when leaving the room. Also near where students enter the classroom, I have a place for students to make a lunch choice each day, as taking a lunch count is required at my school. The lunch choice board is also helpful for taking attendance.
The chairs I have in my room are colorful which has made it easy when creating table groups. I have yellow, red, blue and green groups and I refer to these colored table groups a lot throughout the day when calling students to line up and for centers. My desk is up by the front whiteboard and rug. I like this spot as it is easy to control my computer while also teaching whole group lessons, constantly going from the computer and back to the board. If I am standing at my desk, I have clear sight of everything that is happening around the room. Around the front whiteboard, I have a calendar and a “days in school” count that we use during morning meeting. I also use a schedule that has visuals for my multilingual students and I refer to it often throughout the day. In this space around the whiteboard, I have the alphabet on top and numbers up to 30 with ten frames.
In the back corner of the classroom, I have my classroom library/calm down area. I put a horseshoe table, for small groups, in between my desk and the library to break up the space. When creating a classroom library, finding a quieter space in the room is beneficial. In the library, I include books, stuffed animals, calm down toys, flexible seating, and a rug. My students enjoy spending some “quiet time” in the library.
In kindergarten at my school, a choice time for students is built into our schedule. For choice time, I created different play zones where students can choose to play. Students can choose from a car area, with toy cars, tracks, and a garage, a block area, a puppet theater, the classroom library, a doll area, a play kitchen set, linking logs, lego area, and coloring book area. Creating the play areas for choice time was overwhelming at first, but some of the teachers on my team helped me a lot! They would look on Facebook market place for free toys and pick them up if it was in their area, they let me borrow toys that they were not using, and they gave me advice as to how to run choice time.