Designing Your Classroom: Articles

Designing Your Classroom: Resources

Child Care Design Guide by Anita Rui Olds: Contains everything you need to know to plan, design, and build developmentally appropriate and child-friendly centers. Available from Community Playthings at 40% off bookstore cost.

Caring Spaces, Learning Places Jim Greenman: This exceptional book demonstrates how centers can face real-world challenges and make quality care a reality. Readers will be empowered by new ideas on how to make child care programs work for children, families, and staff.

Early Learning Environments That Work Rebecca Isbell and Betty Exelby: "...Summarizes everything we have known about designing environments for young children and adds newer inspiration from Reggio Emilia classrooms. Everything we are learning from brain research and child development study underscores the importance of an environment with which children can interact, and the importance of teachers in designing that environment." – Gwen Morgan, Wheelock College

Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments. Deb Curtis and Margie Carter: A Child's Work goes inside classrooms around the globe to explore the stunningly original language of children in their role-playing and storytelling. Drawing from their own words, Paley examines how this natural mode of learning allows children to construct meaning in their worlds, meaning that carries through into their adult lives. Proof that play is the work of children, this compelling and enchanting book will inspire and instruct teachers and parents as well as point to a fundamental misdirection in today's educational programs and strategies.

Places for Childhoods: Making Quality Happen in the Real World. Jim Greenman: This exceptional book demonstrates how centers can face real-world challenges and make quality care a reality. Readers will be empowered by new ideas on how to make child care programs work for children, families, and staff.

Great Places for Childhood: Creating Children's Environments That Work: Children need a place that functions as a laboratory, a home, and an outdoor learning environment. This video and facilitator's guide provides a wealth of information for directors and facility designers on creating environments that work for children and teachers.

Room Arrangement as a Teaching Strategy Diane Trister Dodge and Bonnie Kittredge: DVD English/Spanish. This completely updated bilingual DVD presents concrete ideas for arranging preschool classrooms.

Room For Children: Shows the Roomscapes system, and how room layout can improve the function of your center.

Spaces: Room Planning for Early Childhood Education: Do you work with children from birth to four years of age? Perhaps you are planning a new center, or you may have inherited a classroom. Here’s a chance to review the use of your space.

Adults are from Earth; Children are from the Moon Randy White: Designing for Children: A Complex Challenge
The space has been designed. Do the children use it the way you intended? You might be in for a real surprise as you watch children interact in a new environment.

The Great 35 Square Foot Myth Randy White and Vicki Stoecklin: Thirty-five square feet per child? Research shows that the amount of space each child has is the single most important environmental factor affecting the quality of child care programs and the welfare of children and staff.

Aesthetic Codes in Early Childhood Classrooms: What Art Educators Can Learn from Reggio Emilia. Patricia Tarr: Small children don’t notice good art work. Or do they?

Child Care Center Design Guide Pdf U.S. General Services Administration: The objective of the Guide is to promote centers that are child-oriented, developmentally appropriate, beautiful, environmentally sensitive, health promoting, and functional.

Goals for Young Children in Preschool: Classroom Environment: Creating an environment that encourages child initiation, participation and appropriate social interaction should be the goal of every preschool teacher. The physical classroom environment plays a great part in either creating or preventing situations that cause challenging behavior.

Room Arrangements: The Basics Beth Conant: How can there be two classrooms in the same building with the same physical lay-out, the same materials and equipment, but one is orderly, the children are busy, and there is a hum of activity; and in the other, children are running, fighting over materials, and the noise level is disruptive to everyone?