Educational Flooring for Learning Settings

This year our focus is firmly on ‘funky flooring’, the creative potential of using decorative flooring in educational establishments such as schools and children’s centres. Creative Continuity has worked with educational settings for some time now, but custom printed educational flooring is a new product that we launched last year. Since then we have designed and developed various exciting floor murals and printed floor graphics for our clients.

Creative Continuity’s first funky flooring product was a giant 4 meters square floor game we devised for Sure Start’s First Steps in Skelmersdale. Our brief was to create a colourful and educational floor mural and we came up with a snakes and ladders graphic which was printed out on to heavy duty non slip floor laminate to produce creative flooring. The children interacted with the floor graphics by playing snakes and ladders. Large soft dice which doubled as seats were available to be ‘thrown’ or lifted and dropped and the children moved around the floor mural, playing the giant board game. Not only was the floor colourful, friendly and fun but it included a learning element as numbers were depicted as numerals, dots and words and children were encouraged to count as they played. The heavy duty PVC that we used ensured the decorative flooring was hardwearing and durable but versatile as it could be rolled away when not in use. Finally, the floor mural included a promotional element allowing inclusion of the establishment’s name within the border as well as the positive wording “every child matters”.

Another innovative example of creative flooring executed for a client was the sandy beach funky floor we designed and installed at an early years children’s centre. They had inherited a very drab space in a former clinic with gloomy corridors and dark flooring which they wanted to transform into a more conducive learning environment for young children. Together we hit on the idea of a beach and decided to get the children involved right from the get go. We transported sand to the centre and asked the kids to run in the sand and make footprints which were then photographed and translated into floor graphics. The addition of starfish, shells and a gently rippling tide completed the beach scene effect. What was once a dark corridor and an underutilised space became a fun and uplifting playing environment through the inclusion of this funky floor mural.

The sandy beach decorative flooring was repeated and customised for other clients with further additions, for example the name of one educational establishment was ‘scratched’ into the sand. Another client was so taken with their floor and our idea that they shipped in real sand to place on top of the creative flooring for an extra interactive element.

A further development has been the production of floor pictures we printed for a pre school learning centre in Upholland. They had moved into a new building but its bright white space was clinical and limited. Together with the client we decided to bring the outdoors, indoors. The children had planted a wild flower garden from seed at the centre and we photographed the garden at the height of its growth. These images were then printed onto heavy duty PVC material as floor graphics to create a custom printed decorative floor. The beauty of this floor mural is that it is seasonal – as the year progresses we will be able to refresh the floor graphics to provide a relevant, contextual atmosphere.

For more information about our funky flooring, creative flooring and custom printed flooring products, contact us here.