Should You Have an Educational Rug in Your Elementary Classroom?


by Jennifer Dobson - Date: 2010-06-27 - Word Count: 508 Share This!

Teachers of elementary age children are constantly looking to find new, innovative methods to capture children's attention and get them interested in learning. Most children respond particularly well to visual aids and even better to things they can use and with which they can interact. A class of items that fits both categories is educational classroom rugs. For those of you unfamiliar with educational rugs, they are simply rugs that are decorated with various learning aids such as numbers, the alphabet, days of the week, months etc. A virtually endless number of themes exist. If you have a decorating or teaching aid budget for your classroom, purchasing these rugs can be a worthwhile investment and many school districts approve and allocate funds for teachers to purchase these types of learning aids for the classroom because they are a long-lasting and effective investment.

Rugs Help Reinforce Concepts Being Taught

Used passively, these rugs are another way to inundate the classroom environment with important information that children need to commit to memory. The more ways you find to present this information, the better your results will be. Since children are not all the same when it comes to the way they learn best, a variety of methods will help you reach all types of learners. Perhaps the child who has problems remembering the letters of the alphabet when presented in the traditional manner will quickly catch on as he sees the educational rug lying in the floor day after day. Each time he steps on it as he enters the classroom, its image becomes more and more ingrained in his visual memory.

Hands-On Learning

A more active use for educational rugs is to use them as game mats. How about a good old fashioned game of twister using a rug with letters, months etc. instead of the conventional boring colors. Kids will quickly learn to recognize the particular words on the map. Bean bag toss can also be played using educational rugs. With a rug of the alphabet, two teams compete to complete words using each letter of the alphabet. The bean bag is tossed onto the rug and the team must write a word beginning with whatever letter the bag lands on. The first team to form words using all the letters of the alphabet wins. Other rugs are available that are designed as custom games such as board games. Some of the rugs are modular, allowing you to expand the games as the children master a particular area.

DIY Educational Rugs

Educational carpets for elementary classrooms are available from a variety of sources on the Internet. Any theme imaginable is available and some merchants even offer custom designed mats to fit more esoteric needs. If your budget can't accommodate the retail versions, simple, plain mats can be purchased and decorated either by the teacher or even better - by the students. With proper supervision during the process, these mats can be just as effective as more expensive models and also will stimulate the creative process in the children, leading to even more multi faceted learning.


Jen Dobson invites you to take a look at MPMSchoolSupplies.com, her favorite online store for teachers. It has a great selection of products including everything from pretend play toys like pretend food to arts and crafts supplies. Visit today to save 10% off of your first order!n
n Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: