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Books to Enhance Your Classroom Environment

June 27th, 2022 | 2 min. read

By Ann Berry

Learn Research has shown that the classroom environment has the power to maximize the learning experience, self-efficacy, and higher-order thinking skills. In this list, you will find books that can help you transform an ordinary classroom into a beautiful and educationally-enhanced space designed for interest, healing, and growth.


 

Inpired by Nature

Designing Play Places for the Littlest Learners

What can jellyfish, a bunch of grapes, or dandelions possibly teach us about designing early childhood classrooms? As it turns out, quite a lot! Inspired by Nature: Designing Play Places for the Littlest Learners explores how nature offers valuable and important lessons about transforming classroom spaces into places where infants and toddlers can thrive.

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Enticing Environments for People Under Three

Chock-full of colorful photographs from real-world infant and toddler settings, Enticing Environments for People under Three offers fresh ideas for making centers and classrooms inspiring for all of the people who inhabit them.

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Through a Child’s Eyes

How Classroom Design Inspires Learning and Wonder

Through a Child’s Eyes brings a new approach to classroom design that begins and ends with the child’s viewpoint. Each chapter details how the classroom environment influences children’s learning, and the authors provide specific examples of how educators can use the children’s perspective to make their classrooms a place of joy and possibility.

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Rethinking the Classroom Landscape

Creating Environments That Connect Young Children, Families, and Communities

Rethinking the Classroom Landscape invites educators and administrators to rethink the traditional classroom, with inspirational examples showing how to weave elements that reflect each center’s community into the classroom design. Easy-to-implement ideas and strategies are based on five guideposts that help educators create early childhood environments that vividly connect children, adults, and the surrounding community.

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Inspiring Spaces for Young Children

Inspiring Spaces for Young Children invites teachers to enhance children’s educational environment in a beautiful way by emphasizing aesthetic environmental qualities that are often overlooked in early childhood classrooms, such as nature, color, furnishings, textures, displays, lighting, and focal points.

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Room to Learn

Elementary Classrooms Designed for Interactive Explorations

Room to Learn presents the Assessing the Pillars of the Physical Environment for Academic Learning (APPEAL) environmental rating scale, a valid and reliable tool developed by Pamela Evanshen, EdD and Janet Faulk, EdD, to show you how to get the most out of your classroom environment.

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Preschool Beyond Walls

Blending Early Childhood Education and Nature-Based Learning

Preschool Beyond Walls shows practical and strategic ways educators can create rich, explorative, and interdisciplinary learning through extensive outdoor experiences. Learn how to develop and implement a nature-based curriculum to support children’s optimal learning, from start to finish.

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Real Classroom Makeovers

Practical Ideas for Early Childhood Classrooms

Using "before" and "after" pictures of real early childhood classrooms, Real Classroom Makeovers shows early childhood teachers step-by-step how small changes can transform their classrooms into wondrous environments for children to learn and grow.

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The Complete Learning Spaces Book for Infants and Toddlers

54 Integrated Areas with Play Experiences

Complete Learning Spaces for Infants and Toddlers is designed to help busy teachers meet the challenge of creating an effective learning environment for very young children. It includes ideas for planning, using, and evaluating learning spaces that will captivate infants and toddlers and encourage the developmental process.

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Author(s)Laura Wilhelm, Christy Isbell, Rebecca Isbell, Rachel A. Larimore, Janet Faulk, EdD, Pamela Evanshen, EdD, Lois Rosenberry, Mary Ann Rody, Sara Harris, Jessica DeViney, Rebecca Kreth, Sally Haughey, Jody Martin, Sandra Duncan

Ann Berry