Things To Consider When Decorating a Daycare

Setting up a daycare center is a labor of love. Going through the effort of securing a building and the necessary paperwork and licensing can take months or even years. But once you have a building comes the fun part: decorating it.

However, decorating a daycare center still takes a little more loving labor. Here are a few things to consider when decorating a daycare center.

Your Theme or Motif

Because the toddler years are full of colors and patterns, it’s easy for a space to become wild and chaotic. This can make it difficult for little ones to focus on what’s right in front of them. To help cut down on the chaos, it’s useful to focus your daycare’s décor on a theme or motif. Here are a few common ones:

• Animals
• Cities
• Nature
• Fairy tales
• A day at the beach
• Upcoming holidays

Sometimes, it’s easier to pick a few colors and create a color scheme rather than focusing on one theme. That way, you create a neutral design that you can change throughout the year.

The Normal Flow of Your Center

A pretty daycare center is good. But a pretty daycare that is functional is even better. Fortunately, you can use your décor to add to the functionality of your daycare. The best way to do that is to create “stations” throughout your room and decorate based on that.

Let’s say that your kids’ day is divided into free playtime, snack time, arts and crafts time, story time, and nap time. It’s good to divide the room into sections and decorate each section based on what kids do there. The nap-time section can have images of moons and stars, the story-time section images of fairy tales, the craft section pictures of rainbows, etc.

Safety Hazards

The fact that safety is a priority in daycare centers doesn’t even need to be stated. However, it’s important to point out that safety hazards can often come from unexpected sources, and it’s one of the more important considerations when decorating a daycare center.

When choosing furniture pieces for your daycare, be sure they aren’t susceptible to falling over. Mounting them to the wall is the simplest way to ensure this. Wall hangings like posters or photographs should also be hung high enough that curious toddlers can’t pull them off the walls.

Using Non-toxic Paint

Another unseen safety hazard from daycare décor comes from the paint on the wall. Conventional paints are often filled with toxic chemicals that release VOCs into the air. These VOCs can linger even when you can’t smell them anymore. And given that toddlers’ lungs are still developing, this can be problematic.

The best way to keep your center healthy without losing out on bright, colorful walls is to use water-based paints. That’s why ECOS Paints offers a full range of non-toxic* daycare paints from our Lullaby Paints collection.

*Non-toxic - Conforms to ASTM-D4236, specifically concerning oral toxicity, skin irritation and respiratory effects.