Abstarct: School is a common experience for children around the world, and is the first environment after their home which they intimately experience during their first years of life. This space has a direct effect on the learning of children, their understanding of society, and their personal development. Focusing on environmental spaces within the school from a child’s perspective is an intriguing concept which has only recently gained support and has been pursued in participatory architectural designs. During the past decades participatory design projects have often tried to search for and recognize the needs and wants of children from different spaces through input provided patents and teachers. In this study we aimed to gain children’s input with the least amount of external influence and to extract and analyze only their expectations from school environments. Moreover, culture, geographical location, and the responder’s personality all influence their input into a participatory project. Thus such a research is a local and continuous project in need of constant updates. Also since a child’s world view is significantly different from an adult, keeping kids engaged and contributing without influencing the free flow of their ideas is a complex and arduous task. In this study we took on this task through unstructured interviews, and unrestricted graphic and visual art projects by the children themselves. Throughout this process the researcher observed their activities and extracted the opinions and reasoning behind a specific design put forth by the child regarding school environments. Overall 371 primary school students were included in this study. All participants were girls attending public schools. Two random schools were chosen as the sites of the study located within what was regarded as an average school district in Mashhad, Iran. Analysis of the extracted opinions shows that children are mostly concerned about open and natural spaces and the quality of such spaces is important to them. Our results show that children in both elementary periods (One: 6-9 years, Two: 10-12 Years) have similar ideals but these are expressed with different details depending on the child’s psychophysical development stage. One such example is the need expressed by first period students to experience nature, freedom, comfort, and environmental diversity; and for students in the second period to ask for natural views, personal spaces, and group areas within the classroom. It appears that younger students focus more on details, while as they grow they are able to have a more holistic view and understanding. Our results show that a sense of secure spaces, freedom, comfort, and belonging are all favorable to children and thus can increase their affinity to the environment. Using forms that are reminiscent of familiar spaces creates a more tangible, safe, secure, and attractive space for children. Among the most important concepts extracted from the study are: attention to quality of spaces and close connection between open and closed spaces, location of service spaces, compartmentalizing spaces, movement and pause routes, special scale, optical view point, familiar forms, and detailed spaces such as furniture, color, and type of material used. baxsed on these results the current architecture of schools needs to change significantly in order to incorporate the wants of needs of its most precious stakeholders, the children.