Thoughtfully designed early childhood classroom environment

Early childhood consulting + design

Exceptional environments for early childhood.

Early Roots Design helps programs create places where children, educators, and families can thrive.

Request a consultation

Early childhood consulting + design

Exceptional environments for early childhood.

Early Roots Design helps programs create places where children, educators, and families can thrive.

Request a consultation

Philosophy

The environments children inhabit shape how they feel, relate, imagine, and learn.

We work with early childhood programs to make the everyday more intentional: materials with purpose, spaces that hold attention, and systems that give educators room to respond.

Ways to work together

01 — Consultation

A focused perspective on a particular space, challenge, or next move.

02 — Environment Refresh

A cohesive reworking of materials, flow, visual language, and everyday experience.

03 — Comprehensive Transformation

An immersive partnership for programs ready to reconsider the environment, operations, and story as one whole.

Photography and visual storytelling are available as a focused engagement or woven into a larger transformation.

Selected transformations

The difference lives in the details.

Before

After

Transformation

Improved flow, calmer palette, and more intentional material presentation.

Before

After

Program environment renewal

A more coherent environment with clearer rhythms for children, educators, and families.

Before

After

Classroom refresh

A calmer palette, clearer activity zones, and more intentional material presentation.

Selected work

Environments composed with attention to rhythm, material, light, and the life of a program.

Early childhood classroom atelier with natural materials

Material study within an early learning environment

Learning landscape designed for young children

Detail from an intentional early childhood environment

Our approach

01 — Observation

02 — Strategy

03 — Transformation

We begin by looking closely, then give each decision a clear reason to exist.

Gabrielle Wheeler in an early childhood learning environment

Leadership

Gabrielle Wheeler brings decades of early childhood leadership to every engagement.

Gabrielle Wheeler is Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of Early Roots Design, and CEO/Visionary of East Gate Kids Learning Center in Albuquerque. She has led the growth and transformation of a 5-Star program serving children from infancy through school age.

Her work spans operational strategy, organizational growth, staff development, learning environments, quality improvement, and early childhood advocacy. Gabrielle has contributed to statewide initiatives in New Mexico and served in leadership roles within professional early childhood organizations.

Program leadership · Staff culture · Quality improvement · Environment transformation

Engagements

The right scope begins with a careful look.

A focused consultation and a comprehensive transformation ask for different kinds of partnership. We tailor every engagement to the size of your program, the life of the space, and the change you hope to make.

Start a conversation

Let’s talk about your program.

Whether you need a fresh set of eyes on one classroom or support transforming an entire center, tell us a little about what you’re working with and where you’d like to go.