Elementary Music Classroom 2025-2026

It's that time of year again: we're getting my elementary music classroom ready for a new school year! This is my 13th time setting up my classroom in this space, and I had a few "a-ha moments" about the way I've decorated and set up my classroom works for me that I want to share, plus a few tweaks that are relatively small changes but I'm happy about! So here's my elementary music classroom for the 2025-2026 school year.

First here's a quick video tour around the room to get our bearings:

One of the small tweaks I made was switching out the blue circle spots for a lighter blue that matches the line I have marked for the blue row chairs. This was sortof a happy coincidence more than anything- a few of my blue circle spots from last year were getting too worn out and I had some light blue ones from a set I had bought to replace another color a few years ago, and I realized the lighter blue matched the tape after the fact! This is obviously not a big deal for me but I can practically guarantee this is the  thing my students are going to notice first when they walk in my room :)

The other two tweaks are things I've been thinking about for a while and I'm glad to be in a place where I had the time and energy to do them: adjust my Kindergarten learning target spot (again) and update my teacher toolbox drawers. I got the teacher toolbox (something like this one, but I think I got mine at Home Depot) YEARS ago before I had any sort of set color scheme in my classroom, so I had just used a random set of scrapbook paper I thought was cute to decorate the drawers, and it just stayed that way all these years. I finally got some plain colored paper to put in the drawers instead, and now the toolbox finally looks like it belongs in the room! 

Here's my blog post from when I first made the toolbox if you're thinking of making one yourself- it's truly just little pieces of paper stuck inside the front of the drawer but if it lasted me a decade it must be good enough! :)

After doing a lot of work to make posted learning intentions something that actually works for me and my students over the last year and a half or so, I realized that the spot I had set up for posting the visual learning intentions for Kindergarten was way bigger than I needed it to be... which would be fine except I always felt like it was too much pink in one spot and looked a little out of place. Now I just have the same background that I use to write the 1st-6th grade learning intentions so the pink is no bigger than the other colors. I am all about streamlining visuals to keep the room from getting overstimulating!

You can read more about how I use pictures to create visual learning intentions that my pre-readers and language learners can actually benefit from in this blog post.

After doing those few small tweaks and setting up the rest of the room, it ended up taking me about 3.5 hours total to get my room ready for students. Going through the classroom setup process this year made me realize a few things that I thought were worth sharing, especially for newer teachers just starting out in a new classroom and trying to figure out how to get their rooms ready:

use a color scheme as your "decor theme"

Seeing how much my room instantly went from drab to fab just by setting out my ukuleles, boomwhackers, djembes, writing supplies, chair lines, and circle spots gave me fresh affirmation that using the common colors of the instruments and supplies I already have in my room as the "theme" for the rest of my classroom has been a game-changer for me. Using a color scheme instead of specific patterns or aesthetics etc already makes things easier (and makes them more universally appealing to a broader range of students), but I think using the colors of common elementary music classroom instruments is the boss move more elementary music teachers should be using. So many classroom instruments, from boomwhackers to handbells and everything in between, now come in similar colors to help students associate colors with pitches that it makes sense to use those colors. 

If you want to use any of the same posters I have to coordinate with the instrument colors, you can find the full set here.

classroom setup is an evolutionary process

I'm sure it has been said before but getting to the place I am now where I feel comfortable with where everything is and how everything is organized has been a process that has gradually evolved, with lots of trial and error, over the course of over a decade. If you are in your first year in a new classroom it's important to remind yourself of the old saying, "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". Rome wasn't built in a day.

classroom setup can eventually become an easy task

This is related to the last point but I was so pleased with how quickly I was able to set up my classroom this year, and it hit me that there does come a point when classroom setup is no longer the huge ordeal that it often is when you're first starting in a new classroom. Dealing with the pandemic probably made it take longer for me to get to that place since I had to rethink everything during those years, but this is the longest I've ever been in one classroom and it's nice to feel like things are where they should be.

I hope this helps give you some encouragement, inspiration, or at least solidarity if you're setting up your classroom as well! If you want to read more about the different things in my room, or how I think about classroom setup, here are some relevant blog posts below. And of course leave me questions in the comments below or send me an email, I'd love to chat!