The Classroom Environment- September

The classroom environment is one of the most important aspects in the EYFS. I try to keep the classroom fresh and interesting by changing the room linked to our topics and will post about this in more detail on my other blog 'The Role Play Corner'.

It's not always easy and sometimes I end up 'popping in' to school on a Saturday afternoon to set everything up for the new topic on a Monday but lots of things make it worthwhile. The children walking in to the newly decorated classroom and saying "Wow! This is amazing!" and then running outside to find their friends and parents to bring them in and show them what they have seen, children refusing to have time off school when they are ill because they don't want to miss out on what we might be doing and older children in the school saying "It's not fair, your classroom is so much better than ours!".

The only exception to this exciting space is September.

When you walk in to my classroom on the first day of term, it looks awful. But it's meant to.

I put up nothing.

I want the children to understand WHY everything is there so I don't 'decorate' my classroom with mountains of printing and laminating from Sparklebox or Twinkl- what's the point of it all? When they first walk in, the classroom walls are empty and then it becomes their classroom. 

• The children make their own peg labels for the cloakroom and then choose where in the cloakroom they would like their peg to be.
• I take a photograph of each child and they choose their favourite colour from a selection of paper that will go on the wall, with their photo, to be their own personal display space. Over the year, they get to add photos, drawings and other things special to them, to their space.
• We have an initial circle time session where we talk about favourite colours and favourite things to get to know each other and so I can create a themed nameplate for each of the children's wall displays.
• We assess the children's number recognition and then take funny photos of that number of children to create a number line display- it's personal and the children understand WHY it is then hanging in the classroom.
• We talk about the classroom rules and hang them from the ceiling as we know them (I use pedagogs ones from the PTS sticker catalogue).
• After talking about the classroom rules, we introduce Golden Time and set up our golden time wall display.
• We talk about needing to know what we will do each day and set up the display for calendar and visual timetable.
• When we start to take home wordless ORT reading books, we display pictures and name labels of the main characters.
• This year, as we introduce the children to each of the areas of the classroom, I intend to display 'We are...' captions from Twinkl, saying things like 'We are Artists', 'We are Explorers' or 'We are Actors' in the appropriate areas. I want the children (and any adults that come into my room) to see WHY the things are there. I saw this idea on Pinterest ages ago and think it's great but haven't got round to it yet, this is a starter for it.

By the end of the first week or two, it looks like most other EYFS classrooms but the children OWN everything that is there.