Planning your classroom layout -

If you’ve spent any amount of time teaching young children there’s a good chance you’ve also spent a little time drooling over a classroom supply catalog. It’s a lot like pouring over the toy ads at Christmas time when you were a little kid. You know there is no way that you’ll get all of the wonderful things that you see on those glossy pages, but that doesn’t mean you can’t dream!

I just found a tool from Kaplan that I could spend days playing with. It’s called My Kaplan Floor Planner. You enter the dimensions of your classroom, and then you can create floor plans using items from the Kaplan catalog. It’s like playing the Sims with classroom furniture! I can’t believe that I didn’t know about this, and I really don’t know what else to say about it, other than I want to create dream classrooms for hours and not worry about the price tag!

Besides just playing around, this is a really useful tool. The Kaplan catalog is fairly extensive, there is a pretty good chance that most of the items you have in your own classroom can be found in it’s pages (or something relatively similar). There is a very good chance that you would be able to create numerous floor plans for your own classroom that you could actually use throughout the year. This would save so much time when it comes to rearranging your centers and trying new things in the classroom!

They even have sample floor plans, designed specifically for different age groups. Their samples take into consideration NAEYC Accreditation Standards, and the criteria for the Environment Rating Scale for that particular age group.