Bulletin Boards are wonderful things and the bane of my existence sometimes. I love creating pretty or bulletin boards for the beginning of the year, but I struggle with making them interactive for my students. Most of my bulletin boards are out of their reach, so making them accessible is not plausible. I love reading about how others use their boards, so this link up was PERFECT!
I have a giant tackable wall on one side of my room and I divided it into three sections, Reading, Theme (which is what we use for Social Studies and Science) and Writing. I never felt that this space was used to it's fullest potential, but I am not sure what to do with it yet.... I display anchor charts, and visuals that go along with our themes, but nothing really kid generated which is what I would like more of...
One tip I got a while back, that I whole heartedly endorse, is moving away from theme style borders (for example: planet borders for Space) and choosing patterned or neutral borders that will go with everything! I am afraid of heights and having to climb on my bookshelves and change the borders all the time makes me slightly dizzy, haha, so if I can leave the paper and border on all year, then that is what I am going to do. For this board I went chevron in orange, teal and green on yellow paper as these are "my classroom colours"Also, choosing fadeless paper/material/a colour that doesn't fade, is also important as my OCD will not allow me to keep that faded paper (usually blue or black) up for long.
At the front of my room, I have more tackable wall and a blackboard/whiteboard combo. I hate chalk (haha) so I use the blackboard as my calendar/shape of the day/homework board. I put a border, with magnet tape on the back, around the blackboard to make it more fun and eye catching! Underneath the boards are my multiplication monsters that the kids love to look at and use during math. Above the boards I have my number line and cursive alphabet. Beside the chalkboard is a Read Across Canada reading incentive chart that I tried this year. The kids read and hand in their reading logs and get to move a little car that I made from province to province. I might change it up this year, or rethink it a bit. With last year being my first in Grade 3, some things kind of fizzled by the end of the year...
And just because I could not resist, this was my welcome back/summer review BB last year, and I am going to do it again this year because it was so cute and #awesome! I gave the kids a blank polaroid frame and had them draw a moment from their summer, and then create a hashtag to show what it was about. In third grade hashtagging (is that a verb?) is hard but they (mostly) conquered the concept! I made the IG icons out of cardstock and circle dies. I had so much fun making the big one that I had to make a few cute little ones as well! 3NEW is my class identifier as we have three grade 3 classes, so I had to give that a hashtag! Once I hung all their summer memories, the board was done!
Thanks for checking out my post! Have a great day!
~Laurie
