It may sound like the easiest and most fun part of being a teacher, but any seasoned professional will tell you that designing bulletin boards can be a real challenge. These days, teachers are often judged by their bulletin board, since busy administrators and superintendents just don’t have the time to come into the classroom and watch what we do. They need to assess a teacher’s performance in a quick school walk-through. So they rely on teacher bulletin board to tell them what they need to know.
Of course, this is a terrible method for measuring teacher success, as any dedicated educator can tell you. It also means incredible pressure on teachers, as fresh bulletin board displays are demanded every month. These teacher bulletin board must not only be creative and decoratively attractive, but they must also showcase the students’ accomplishments, provide evidence of learning progress, and update viewers on the specific curriculum being taught.
At the same time, teacher bulletin boards can be a fine opportunity for educators. They don’t have to be a burden.
The simplest and most effective way to design a clever and eye-catching bulletin board display is to start with a theme. Themes should be related to the academic topic which the students have been working on. For starters, teacher bulletin boards can always be based around themes such as the four seasons, or specific holidays and celebrations. An autumn themed bulletin board is very easy to do, as long as you have some construction paper. Have the kids cut out large fall leaves. Pin up some shiny red apple cut-outs. It’s easy to tie a season into almost any academic subject. Have the students write word problems all involving apples, volume of leaves raked, or the pencils sharpened in preparation for school. Hang up their work amidst the autumn decorations that you and the children made, and, viola! A gorgeous autumn-themed bulletin board has been created.
Other wonderful teacher bulletin boards can be created around any fun theme you can think up. I’ve done under-the-sea bulletin boards, which are great for science work. I once created a flower garden bulletin board, which I used to showcase the students’ writing work. Since I use a process-based writing approach, each aspect of the flower garden represented a stage in the children’s writing process – a seed for their original ideas, a stem representing their drafting and revising, and finally their published work was the flower at the top.
Any theme you can think of can be used to construct imaginative teacher bulletin boards. Be creative, and have lots of fun.