What We Put on Our Classroom Walls Matters!
New York Times Article - Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom By: Kyleigh Pharris, EC-SEAT Scholar As a certified preschool through third grade educator and a special education kindergarten intern, I am constantly in search of new research that will assist me in creating a classroom environment that is respectful to young learners. Stumbling upon The New York Times blog article Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom by Jan Hoffman, really got me thinking about what our classroom environments really say to children. In the article, Hoffman describes a study conducted with 24 kindergarten children through the Carnegie Mellon University. To broadly sum up the findings in the study, researchers discovered that classroom walls that were highly decorated in teacher bought posters of bright colors and cartoon characters, meant to inspire children to learn, really distracted them from learning. The research supports austere classroom aesthetics for young lea...
