Have you ever thought that the walled area of your classroom is your teaching assistant?? sounds weird?? But its a fact that you can use all the walls, ceiling and floor of your classroom to assist you the most during your daily class lessons!!

There is a big misconception when comes to Montessori classroom decor ideas.  Mostly teachers decorate their classroom so that it appears attractive to the kids, their parents and the higher authorities of their school.   But neglect the learning of the students which actually should be the primary most objective behind the decor of every single inch of their classroom. We recommend that you should decorate your classroom in such a way that every corner helps you and facilitates you while teaching and your students while learning.

Focus “Learning By Looking”

Make sure that there’s a big difference between decorating a bedroom and a classroom. When you plan to decorate a bedroom, you prefer aesthetics but for a Montessori classroom decor, first comes the learning and then comes an aesthetically pleasant display. Kindergarten kids mostly learn by looking at things, as they are first exposed to the recognition of letters, sounds, small words, numbers, shapes and colours. Even reading is learnt through sight recognition. “Sight” is the sense you will have to target while planning for your Montessori classroom decor. You will be manipulating walls, ceiling, and even floor of your classroom so that it becomes a visual teaching aid for you. Your classroom must speak aloud visually whatever you are teaching today and reinforce all the contents you have yet accomplished teaching. Just like a theatrical performance, it should serve you as stage, complimenting and giving meaning to your acting performance.

Give Captions To Every Classroom Object

Paste captions to every classroom object such as white board, chair, table, cupboard, numbers board, Urdu board, Art corner, phonics or alphabet board, air conditioner, shoe rack, book shelf, etc. For writing these captions, you can simply get these words typed and printed in big sized and bold font so that the captions are readable even from the ending of the classroom. Paste these captions and use finger pointing technique to mention the names of objects. you can even play a game of finding out objects with the kids in which you would speak the name and they will point the written caption. this is how we develop sight reading of commonly used object names. You can even paste the name of every student behind one chair. shuffle the chairs and ask them to search their chair.

Make A Daily Attendance Chart

You can specify a corner of a wall for making a big attendance chart with rows showing the names of students written in an attractive and bright colour and columns showing the weekdays. Now cut several geometric shapes such as stars, triangles, squares of coloured chart papers. Tell your students to paste one shape daily in front of their names and under the appropriate weekday. You can help them out in the morning when they enter the classroom in marking attendance. Through this activity, you can achieve multi learning objectives such as names recognition, sight reading of weekdays, recognition of colours and shapes, building up of the grouping, classifying, locating, pointing and finding ability. To make this chart attractive you can add up a few colourful flowers or cartoon characters around it.

Use Walls As Display Boards

Divide the walls equally among five display areas. Number Board, Letters or Alphabets Board, Urdu Board, Art Display, Colours and Shapes Board, and one board left blank to be used for miscellaneous purposes. You can beautifully and purposefully decorate the background of these boards so that they appear attractive. Leaving a wide space to paste the present vocabulary pictures, numbers, letters, words, or whatever suits your lesson. Make boards so that it is easy to paste and remove objects so that you can modify then even daily without any fatigue. This will aid your daily class lessons while you can also paste the previous few contents for reinforcement sake in any of the corners of these boards. You can make big size transparent pockets to put flash cards in, showing your lesson contents or reinforcement contents. Make effective use of these boards by pointing towards the contents displayed while teaching. Engage the students in finding out the reinforcement contents quite often. Keep updating these boards on daily or weekly basis according to your curriculum pace.

Hang Three Dimensional Mobiles From Ceiling

You can hang three dimensional shapes, or birds, clouds and other three dimensional mobiles from ceiling. To give concept of day and night, you can make use of ceiling. hang moon and stars, or hang sun mobile with day and night birds. change the theme at intervals so that students don’t get bored and take notice of the change. Also you can introduce weather conditions using ceiling and mobiles. clouds, rain drops and snow flakes can easily be made and hung. To show sunny you can hang a big sun with yellow sun rays coming out from it and spreading along the ceiling. You can also hang various letters and numbers from the ceiling as hanging mobiles. Make sure that these mobiles don’t have the same height. Different heights and sizes make them more noticeable.

Paint Number Games On Floor

You can paint number games such as snakes and ladder game and many others on floor. You can engage students in playing them by rolling a big dice and taking their turns. They will be counting, adding or subtracting and learning a lot while having fun in the class. If painting isn’t allowed by your school management, you can paint an inexpensive rug piece and place it on the floor.

Make Jumbled Flash Cards Baskets

Take a few empty cartons and decorate the outer side of them. put a huge number of jumbled flash cards showing numbers, alphabets, Urdu letters etc. You can add up flash cards showing pictures relevant to the recognition of these numbers or letters or vocabulary pictures for these letters or numbers. Use these baskets for sorting our and matching activity games. If you have five round tables in your class, you can make five such baskets. tell every student a different letter or number to find and match with its vocabulary out of so many in the basket. This is an ever ready game activity for your daily lessons.

There are for about hundreds of more such handy tips for teachers on Montessori classroom decor ideas. Stay in touch with us and you will get enough stuff in this context. Using these tips, hope you decorate your classroom effectively and enhance the learning many folds!

Photo Credits:

butterflymosaic’s

knittymarie’s

Mrs.F’s