How To Decorate Your Classroom For Autumn

The autumn tide brings crisp mornings, changing leaves, and new ideas for creating classroom decorations inspired by autumn. The theme of trees and leaves are central to the autumn season and can be re-created in a variety of classroom decorating ideas.

Tree Door Decoration

A classroom tree works really well on a good-sized wall in the classroom or for classroom door decoration. Create the trunk and branches of a large tree out of brown construction paper or a large piece of cardboard. Have your students participate by embellishing the tree trunk and branches with crayons, markers or colored pencils, adding lines and other accents to the tree.

Then, have your students cut leaves out of green, red, orange, yellow and brown construction paper. Encourage them to experiment with gluing two or three different colors together to make the leaves appear as though they are in the midst of changing color. Connect the leaves to the tree using adhesive or tape and then write each child’s name on one of the leaves. By adding names to the leaves, the classroom tree begins to look like a family tree, which may lead to a classroom discussion about this topic.

Inspiring with Watercolor Leaves

Watercolors, with their soft, dreamy tones and the gentle bleeding of one color into another, lend themselves perfectly to fall classroom decorating. One simple craft is to ask the children to create large watercolor paintings on both sides of watercolor paper, making sure you give them enough time to dry before painting the other side. Then cut out the watercolor paintings into the shapes of leaves and hang the leaves from the ceiling or tape them to the windows. The watercolor leaves make really cool classroom decorations!

You can string together some of the smaller leaves to make a garland for the bulletin board or chalkboard. You may want to mix in some leaves cut out of construction paper to add more character to the border. There are also some really nice fall themed bulletin board sets you can purchase if you would rather do that. If you or your students cut extra large leaves, they can be used as a background for fall poetry.

Decorating With Words

Because autumn is the time when students return to school, a great way to get their minds moving (while also creating classroom decorations) is by brainstorming. To start with ask them to name as many things as they can that have to do with autumn. After they have had time to brainstorm take all of the words they came up with and write them onto colored construction paper. The words can then be cut out and hung up around the classroom or used as classroom door decorations.

Decorating With Squash and Pumpkins

Make a beautiful display by arranging small pumkins, squash or gourds either on shared tables or a side table in the classroom. These veggies will last a long time and bring the bounty of nature into the classroom, as well as enhance your classroom décor with their colorful skins.

Hopefully these classroom decorating tips for the autumn season will help you make an enjoyable learning environment for the children and get the new school year started off on the right foot.