A rug or carpet is the central, essential element in any classroom. It’s what brings the room together and provides children with a space to gather, get comfy, and participate in social group learning and activities.
The classroom carpet helps students focus on lesson activities and acts as a teacher’s aid, or simply lets kids get fully immersed in the classroom reading corner. Here are some important roles a classroom carpet plays. There might be some you’ve never even considered before!
- A prompt for learning and revision: there’s a whole range of classroom carpets out there to choose from with different graphics, designs, and illustrations on them. Choose from words, images, patterns, and colours. Putting some thought behind your classroom carpet can help provide you with a visual aid to incorporate into games or revision activities.
- A comfy space: padded and reinforced carpet provides a soft, cosy space in the classroom for children to work on or share story time quietly. Comfort is important to help children focus and calm down for these kinds of activities.
- Central meeting point: a carpet will help teachers quickly gather their students together in an easy-to-spot main space, meaning you can organise the class and move from activity to activity more quickly. The carpet also represents a localised space where children will be together as a group, discouraging them from dispersing.
- Noise reduction: the soft padding of the carpet will mean any steps or fidgeting around is muffled, helping everyone to concentrate on a story being told or a quiet activity.
The Best Classroom Rugs for All Your Needs
Our previous article covered the top ten reading corner carpets for school classrooms. Here, we’ve rounded up the top classroom mats depending on what you need, whether that’s an affordable rug, a mat that stands up to wear and tear outdoors, or a sensory carpet to help with learning disabilities.
Best Large Classroom Rug
Rainbow™ Squares Large Placement Carpet
The Rainbow Squares rug is our favourite large option. If you’re working with an ample classroom space or need a carpet for a communal area like a library, this is the one. At 3m x 3m it’s one of our largest rugs available.
With such a large surface area covered by your rug, we like this design because it’s not too busy and won’t interfere with the overall look of your classroom.
Best Cheap Classroom Carpet
Children of the World Ultrasoft Mat
We know that schools are always working to a tight budget, so finding a good affordable classroom carpet is important. We've got the solution if you’re on the hunt for a cheap classroom mat. Our Children of the World rug is just £37.99 and comes with a non-slip backing and ultra-soft pile.
We also stock a Bird with Tree design and Frog on Pond design in the same style at the same price.
Most Versatile Classroom Carpet
There’s two entries for our most versatile classroom carpet category.
The first is our Under the Sea Double-Sided Carpet, which has an exciting design on both sides. Choose from a realistic mysterious undersea scene with aquatic creatures and plants or a more uniform sea shell pattern on the other side.
We love this reversible rug which helps you transform your classroom in seconds. Why not use one side for activities and the other for storytime?
Our other favourite versatile school mat is the Round Folding Mat, an ingenious design that can be laid out flat as a comfy padded mat or folded to create a corner seat. Our round folding mats come in blue, beige, or this realistic straw pattern.
Best Outdoor School Mat
Back to Nature™ Garden Outdoor Mat
Yes, we even sell outdoor school mats! These are great for outdoor activities where you want students to be able to sit down comfortably and have a central point to return to when the teacher needs their attention. An outdoor rug is also an excellent way to provide dry space to sit down, so you don’t have to worry about the erratic English weather too much!
Our favourite playground rug is the Garden Outdoor Mat which features decorative natural pathways for children to explore.
Best Classroom Carpet Tiles
Story Time Interactive Carpet Tiles with Holdall
Sometimes one big classroom carpet won’t do, and teachers look for individual mats or tiles. These are ideal if you want a lot of flexibility in your classroom. Kids can easily grab a tile and bring it to the room's centre. Separate tiles can be used as markers or arranged in a particular way, or the classroom might simply be an awkward shape for one large rug.
Our favourites in this category are the Story Time Interactive Carpet Tiles that come with a holdall to make tidying away easy and prevent any stray tiles from going missing. This collection features visual prompts for storytelling, such as a frog, a dragon, the weather, and characters. Use these tiles as activity prompts or to prompt your students’ imaginations during storytime.
Best Activity Classroom Carpet
Classroom carpets with designs can be included in school activities and used as prompts by teachers. We love the Seasons Carpet because it can be used all year round, no matter what year group you teach.
Use the visual and written prompts on the circular rug to talk to children about the seasons and upcoming national holidays. Help students see how far they are from Christmas and the summer holidays and talk about what to expect at certain times of the year.
Best Storytime Classroom Carpet
Rainbow™ Semi-Circle Placement Carpet
For storytime, you need a classroom carpet that is big enough to welcome every student, individual spots on the rug help kids organise themselves and find a space. It’s also important to have a thick, soft, comfy rug to help kids concentrate.
For storytime, it has to be the Rainbow™ Semi-Circle Placement Carpet. This rug in the shape of a semi-circle is designed especially for all the children using it to focus on the teacher. Designs on the mat include individual circle placements for kids to sit on, all around a central rainbow spot for the teacher. The shape of this rug also means it can be placed in a cosy corner of the room out of the way.
Best Classroom Matt for Learning Disabilities
Learning disabilities are so wide-ranging. We understand sometimes it’s challenging to get it right for every student in the class because the ways children learn are so varied. We’ve got two favourites in this category.
The Emotions™ Interactive Square Carpet is a large, plush rug featuring 30 placement spots with different visual facial emotions. This is a perfect rug for learning support, where visual prompts can help understand kids’ feelings and moods during activities.
Although visual prompting is an excellent way to help children with some learning disabilities, we know they can also be overstimulated. That’s why our other recommendation is our simple Rectangle Rug in a plain, soothing block shade of dark blue that won’t interfere with concentration and provides a comfy, soft, safe space.
Best Numeracy Classroom Rug
100 Square Multiplication Grid Carpet
Numeracy-themed classroom carpets come in handy when reinforcing skills and practices children need to learn in Maths. It’s a good idea to look for a versatile numeracy rug that can be used to revise different learning modules.
The 100 Square Multiplication Grid Carpet is good for just that. The 2m x 2m large carpet features a times table grid to support multiplication activities. However, we’ve found this rug, with its large and clear grid of numbers, is also great for addition, subtraction, and division activities too, where teachers and kids can point to different tiles.
Best Literacy Classroom Rug
Rainbow™Oval Pencils Alphabet Carpet
Literacy-themed school carpets are a great idea to help kids get their heads around reading and writing skills. We like the Rainbow™Oval Pencils Alphabet Carpet so much because of its simple design. The upper and lower case letters of the alphabet arranged around the rug's perimeter are only accompanied by pen and pencil designs. This means there are no visual prompts to help kids think of words associated with the letters leaving it completely up to the students to think for themselves.
Of course, for younger kids, we also offer literacy rugs with visual prompts like the Alphabet Carpet.
