Sandra Duncan – författare

The classroom environment is an essential component for maximizing learning experiences for young children. Inspiring Spaces for Young Children invites teachers to enhance children's educational environments 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. Step-by-step instructions and lush photographs take educators through the process of transforming ordinary classrooms into creative, beautiful learning spaces, providing children with an environment where they can learn and grow. With easy-to-implement ideas that incorporate nature, children's artwork, and everyday classroom materials, the photographs and ideas in this book promote creativity, learning, and simple beauty.

An early childhood classroom should reinforce and enhance young children’s sense of belonging and connection to their environment, each other, their families, and their community. 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 and decoration. Colorful photos show what teachers can do to encourage a sense of community unique to each classroom. 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. These community environments include connections to past and present, geography, typography, flora, and fauna.Rethinking the Classroom Landscape has won the Creative Child Magazine, 2017 Book of the Year Award.

A groundbreaking tool that assesses classrooms in a whole new way! An inspiring environment is essential for helping young children learn. The Rating Observation Scale for Inspiring Environments (ROSIE) is an observation rating scale that challenges teachers to examine classrooms in a totally new way: with an eye for what is aesthetically beautiful and inspiring. Looking through an aesthetic lens of nature, color, furnishings, textures, displays, lighting, and focal points, educators will learn to determine a classroom’s level of aesthetic beauty. ROSIE then provides images and examples to assist in turning learning spaces into inspirational environments in which children can grow and learn.

When was the last time you got down on your hands and knees to see your classroom from a child’s height? Research shows that effective early childhood classroom design begins from the ground up. Classroom design is a crucial component of an effective learning environment. Through a Child’s Eyes: How Classroom Design Inspires Learning and Wonder brings a new approach 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. Identify ways to improve your classroom environment and design that will stimulate learning, reduce challenging behaviors, and inspire children’s innate sense of wonder.Transform everyday objects into useful classroom elements that invite curiosity, provide sensory explorations, and fuel creative learning.Explore quick, easy, and affordable DIY projects to develop learning areas.