Fort Worth ISD is giving its pre-K classrooms a makeover. Here’s why that matters.
The smell of birch wood filled classroom no. 117 at M.H. Moore Elementary School on Friday as new furniture was assembled for the school’s incoming pre-K classes.
The light wood was complemented by a bright, multi-color rug laid out in the front of the room among “interest areas” focused on reading, discovery, art, toys and games, and “dramatic play” with a child-sized fridge, oven, sink and microwave.
The classroom was the first of 250 to be outfitted with new tables, chairs, shelves and more as the Fort Worth Independent School District invests $3.4 million in improving the classroom environment through better functionality and more hands-on learning, said Olayinka Moore-Ojo, the district’s executive director of early learning.
The furniture ties in with a new curriculum adopted about two years ago by the district, known as the Creative Curriculum for Texas. It allows children to explore and draw conclusions from questions more independently while under the guidance of teachers and through play-based learning.
“It’s easy to look at it like, ‘Oh it’s just furniture. How does that equal academic gains and outcomes?’ There is a lot of research that talks about how indoor and outdoor learning environments have direct correlations on student achievement and foundational stages,” Moore-Ojo said.
Of the 250 classrooms district-wide, half will get the new furniture before the first day of school starts on Aug. 14 while the other half will receive the furniture during winter break, Moore-Ojo said. Classrooms with a greater need were prioritized.
Lakeshore Learning, a California-based company that provides classroom and learning materials for early childhood to high school ages, is supplying the furniture. Regional Manager Anthony McKee said 130 classrooms will be set up across 43 campuses in the next two weeks.
“This is the largest project I’ve done with Lakeshore in nine years, at one time,” McKee said. “We’ll do a school that has 25-30 classrooms; we do those all the time. But this is multiple campuses.”
“It’s a legacy purchase. We offer a lifetime warranty on all of our tables, chairs and storage units. So if they break, we’re replacing them,” he added.
That’s a positive for veteran teachers like Clara Williams, who has taught pre-K for 30 years at Sunrise-McMillan Elementary School. Her classroom is one of the 130 included in the first phase of the furniture rollout. Some of her current furniture needed repair and was not designed for pre-K, she said.
“We’ve always been able to meet the needs of our students with whatever resources we’ve been given, but what a great blessing to be given a new opportunity with a new setting,” Williams said. “The environment is important because it’s the third teacher.”
The old furniture typically consisted of two or three long tables, or crescent-moon-shaped tables, that essentially split a class in half between the teacher and teaching assistant, Moore-Ojo said.
“Now they’re in their environment doing hands-on instructional activities that are developmentally appropriate. And they have smaller equipment and resources embedded into those various areas of the classroom,” Moore-Ojo said.
Ricardo Alvarez, principal of M.H. Moore Elementary School, said he’s excited for the students to enjoy a “state-of-the-art” learning environment that will set the stage for the rest of their school years and give them an advantage for success down the road.
“Even as adults, we learn better when we are engaged in play-based learning,” Alvarez said. Those (interest areas) are intentional. They are learning about math while they are using sand. They are learning about counting while they are using blocks.”
