Select supplies that will enrich your students' academic environment. This includes math and science supplies like calculators, magnifying glasses, plant identification guides, mirrors, clocks and calendars. Consider equipping your classroom with music and art from various cultures.
Equip your classroom with tools to develop your students' fine motor skills. These could include art supplies such as beads, paints, paper, easels, coloring pencils and charcoal. Get as many supplies as you want, depending on your budget.
Provide your students with tools to help them use their creative imagination. These could include building blocks, props to put on miniature plays of their own, board games, puppets, and play sets that depict parts of your community, such as hospitals and police stations. Not only can such supplies help your students to think creatively, they can also encourage discussion of different career paths.
Divide your classroom into learning "stations." You can create a books station, a toy area, an art area, writing area, and computer area with age-appropriate games that teach students how to use a computer mouse, connect dots, and order numbers. Be sure to continue to organize materials into appropriate areas. Not only are the materials themselves indispensable, the organization that you create will give students their first picture of the organization of the world at large.
Tag the shelves of your classroom with child-friendly labels. Indicate in big, block writing how they can put away toys, books and other supplies. In this way, you will help your students to get a sense of personal responsibility and agency; moreover, they will start taking pride in the space.
Work alongside the children as much as possible. Spending time with the children and mentoring them is the best way to make them feel at ease around adults and to foster a nurturing atmosphere. Offer children a hand to hold, a lap to curl up in, or just your presence. Make conversation with children, and instead of criticizing or praising their statements, make constructive criticism about their ideas to help them develop their thinking.
Encourage children's problem-solving. Preschool is one of the first opportunities that students get to spend time with their peers, choose play partners, and work out conflicts among them. Allow students to gain these critical skills, but stand by when children are working out problems. When your judgment dictates that intervention is necessary, help students work out their conflicts.
Create a daily routine for your students, an experience that will benefit them in years of school and life to come. Start off the day with a plan-do-create routine in which the children choose how they want to spend their free time, decide what work they are going to do individually at each of the stations in your classroom, and then do work by themselves, for about an hour. Incorporate outside time, as well as community time, in which students do activities such as singing songs together.