Handmade pink flowers and hanging paper globes dotted Barb Brown's sixth-grade classroom Monday morning where she's taught for the past 13 years at Stanton School in Fox Lake.

Gone were her books and microscopes, squired away in an adjoining room, while workers from Tampa-based Smart Schools Training and Research, a company that specializes in classroom organization, decorated Brown's classroom thanks to a reading grant that paid for the makeovers at Spring Grove District 114.  

Brown said she didn't mind being kicked out of her classroom for a day while others riffled through her materials. 

Anything that gets me more organized is a good thing, Brown said. "I'm looking forward to seeing other people's ideas."

For the next eight hours, Smart Schools workers put up shelves, made brightly-colored decorations and marked bins for reading materials.

The makeovers at Stanton on Monday and Lotus School in Spring Grove on Tuesday are designed to make learning easier in a more student-friendly environment, said Smart Schools owner April DeCesare, who was leading the organizing efforts. 

In every Smart School classroom, there is what's called a highly decorated and brightly colored word wall where individual alphabet letters are pasted to a wall, DeCesare said. Also,  the classroom library is organized with bins separated by genre, she said. 

The rooms are divided into sections, including technology where computers are stored and a reading and writing area for small group instruction, DeCesare said.  The idea is that if the rooms are more visually pleasing to students, it'll be more conducive toward learning, she said. 

"Before the rooms were teacher friendly, but now they are student friendly," DeCesare said. 

The district received a $100,000 literacy grant, administered over a three-year period, of which $30,000 was marked for the schools' makeovers, said Associate Superintendent Susan Schuenemann.

The district hopes to makeover more district classrooms in the next two years, she said. 

-Story and photos by Sue Ter Maat, TribLocal.com reporter