Gina from The Autism Helper recommends five classroom essentials: fold-able dividers, rolling shelves with lockable wheels, plastic cube chairs, foam mat tiles, and low wipe-clean cubbies. She explains practical benefits like flexible room setup, safety, and easy cleaning for pre-K classrooms.
Hi everyone, this is Gina from The Autism Helper. I am here today with my roundup of a few of my favorite things for pre-K classrooms or early childhood classrooms in general. I feel like with COVID and everything else going on, I would give you a good material list. Um, these are things that I normally use anyway, and I feel like they can be compliant with health compliance, whatever, you know, your district is rolling out for, uh, safety reasons. So for example, my first thing I want to show you are these colorful dividers. I use them all the time. You can mix and match the way that you put them. You can use them one at a time. If you buy multiple ones, you can make these cool little walls that you can actually fold them in when you're not using them or block off areas that are not of use. These are absolute lifesavers. I found these on Lakeshore, but you can find them in a different place. Just be careful to make sure that when you order them that they either come with these feet or you have to order them separately. So just a little tip for you. Um, and they're a little pricey, but again, they're worth it because you can configure your room whatever based on your needs of your kids. So that's my first suggestion, is to get a couple of these dividers. Another thing that I really, really love are rolling shelves, um, with the wheels on them. They do lock, so, you know, if you're thinking about safety reasons, if kids climb on them or you have runners or climbers in your room, you might be a little bit hesitant to use these, but they actually do lock and they are, you know, safe. And the reason why I love them is because you can face them, you know, outwards when it's time to play with the blocks, and then you can rotate them inwards when you want to close up a center so that kids don't have access to them at all times. A lot of our little ones, their receptive language isn't quite formed yet, or they might have a deficit in that area, so constantly telling kids that the blocks aren't available when they're facing outwards can be a little bit tricky. So just being able to show that they're not available is a really, really great thing. You can put anything you want on here. I had different shelves for science and math and all kinds of things. So rolling shelves are your friends. You can also find shorter ones so that you can make sure that you see kids at all times. So that's another tip for you. Another thing that I love are these cube chairs. You can get them on sale from Amazon. I love them because they're made out of like a plastic material, easily wipeable. Even before COVID we were always wiping our chairs down, washing them, cleaning them. The custodians could come in really easily and clean them for us. So again, this is a great COVID chair for you this year. And then you can flip them upside down if they want to sit a little higher or if they like it lower. We also would put kids' pictures on here if we had difficulty with kids kind of dominating over one chair, and that helped with a lot of structure and classroom management. So you can actually put their picture, just Velcro right on the side. You can also put their visuals on the side. Another thing that I love and I used last year, which I would recommend using these maybe over carpet this year because they're very easy to clean, are these foam mats, and they're really relatively cheap to buy. They come in these little tiles and they just put together like little pieces of a puzzle. Very easy to use. Like I said, our custodians could come in and like actually mop them. We could take them out, power wash them, spray them down, whatever we needed to do. They do get a little like dingy after a while, so this might be something that you replace maybe yearly, or with COVID maybe, maybe more often. However, at $26.57, that's not bad at all. I would maybe use these in my circle time as opposed to a carpet this year, have them in my library area, my cozy corner, my block area, So when kids build blocks, it's quiet. So great, great, great thing to get and very cheap. We are not being paid for any of these ads. These are just my favorite things. And the last thing that I wanted to show you are these coat lockers. Again, you know, kind of pricey, but you can use them each year, easy to wipe down. As my kids came in in the morning, they would hang up their things. They're short so that our little ones can reach it and at least put their things kind of up on the hook. And I would have their pictures inside here and down here. That way they could always see which cubby was theirs along with their name. Then we would put in extra clothes, extra diapers in here, socks, shoes, hats, whatever extra materials right, right down here and then book bags. Then usually there's 2 hooks and you could actually fit 2 kids in a cubby. So you would just have 2 pictures. Of course this year everything might be separated more. So you might have to alternate or Maybe it'll be handled more with adults this year, but again, cubbies, great organization tip, worth the money. They kind of show the other things that you can put in here. Those are a few of my favorite things. I have more of my blog posts and lots of blog posts about what actually goes in my classroom, but I was thinking with COVID and everything else to show you some of my favorite things.
