Revamp Your ECE Classroom Space: Transforming Classrooms with Creative Hacks
Anisha Grossett • March 18, 2024
One of the best things you can do to keep your classroom children engaged, curious, and stimulated is to change your layout, add different textures, or utilize window space and ceiling areas.
Redesigning should be your friend, not something scary!
Adding wall art, decor, and organic materials should never be overlooked. This is a classroom, yes, but it is also your home away from home. Let's make it beautiful and functional together with these classroom hacks.
The first and easiest thing I always recommend
for any classroom is bringing in live plants. Artificial plants can offer some benefits, but the advantages of live plants outweigh the cons of nurturing them. Plants offer stress-reducing and calming properties that can help with mental ailments. They also improve the air quality around you, which is a great hack for fresher air when your classroom windows don’t open. Plus, it's fun to have the children water and garden with you—a hack for children is to cut a paper plate on one side into the middle and place it around the plant on top of the soil, acting as a barrier. This will keep any unwanted hands out of the soil!
The next recommendation
I would make is to get some wall decor! This is helpful for you as the educator, creating a second home for the children and for someone who enjoys both functional and unique art. The best thing you can do for your classroom is to get some stuff on the walls, using macrame hangers for your plants, stuffed animals, or other items. Have some natural materials on your bulletin boards like burlap, fabric pieces, or even faux fur or plants as borders. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why this is even a recommendation, let alone a top recommendation. That's because these are also functional—they help reduce sound in the classroom. Reducing classroom sounds helps children develop speech and even reduces some unwanted behaviours.
The last recommendation
I can give—aside from learning more about your specific room's needs and interests—is to add lights and covers to the lights. Classrooms can go from very energetic to winding down for nap time by simply changing the lights from white/yellow to blue. Great ways to incorporate this are through cost-effective LED light strips, fairy lights, and even desk lamps with blue light bulbs. We forget as adults that light is a visual cue for us. The light tells us when it's bedtime, or for those of us from the 80s and 90s when to get home. The light also tells us when to wake up. Why can’t it tell us when to feel calm or when to feel kindness? To further that, studies have also shown light can be used as therapy to heal the body. Utilizing lights and colours to your classroom's needs is a home run all around; it's good for the soul, the body, and the mind!
Redesigning your room shouldn’t cost hundreds of dollars. These three incredible hacks should cost under $20 each, or you can shop around for a bargain on local marketplaces to stretch your dollar.
These are so simple but often missed. Once you start integrating any one of these into your classroom, you’ll notice a difference in the children, how you show up to educate the little ones, and how many parents and peers want to incorporate your ideas into their spaces.
Finding Joy and Purpose in the Middle of the Year Somewhere between the excitement of September and the promise of summer, there’s February — the quiet stretch in the middle. The new-year energy has faded, the routines feel repetitive, and many educators find themselves just trying to make it to the next long weekend. If you’ve been feeling that way lately, you’re not alone. This season can be one of the hardest in early childhood education — the weather’s cold, the classrooms are busy, and energy levels are low. But this moment also offers something powerful: an invitation to pause, reflect, and reignite your passion for why you started in this field in the first place.
Every January, we make promises. To eat better. To plan more. To do more. But this year, I want to invite you to make a different kind of promise — one that centers you. Because before you can nurture others, you must nurture yourself. And as early childhood educators, you are the heartbeat of the classroom. You are the tool, the connection, the comfort, and the calm that every child looks to. Your well-being, your energy, your spark — these are the most powerful instruments you bring into your work each day. So what if this was the year you decided to refill your own cup first?