Showing posts with label classroom decor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classroom decor. Show all posts

I love looking for fresh classroom decor ideas!  And a new back to school bulletin board is one of the easiest ways to make my classroom look new and fresh without a whole lot of effort.


Here are 3 of my favorite bulletin boards for back to school or any time of the school year!


Lego Bulletin Board

When my oldest was in 2nd grade, we homeschooled because....Covid.  And he was (and still is) obsessed with legos.  


So it only made sense to do a lego themed classroom and bulletin board.  This lego bulletin board was quick and easy to make and made a huge visual impact in our space!


I covered the bulletin board in black fabric.  Then I used Mega blocks and hot glued them around the edge of the bulletin.


After that, I used our board to attach all of our anchor charts as we made them.  It made the perfect learning board!  You can read more details about how I created our homeschool space here.


This bulletin board also worked great for adding some inspirational quotes as well!  Grab this set to make your own here.


Paintbrush Bulletin Board

Another one of my favorite back to school bulletin boards is this paintbrush bulletin board.  I made this bulletin for my preschool Sunday School class and it stayed up for several years because it looked so stinkin cute!  


I started with a black fabric background again because....easy! :)


Then, I got paint swatches for the border.  This was back when teachers were using paint swatches for all the things because they were free and super cute.  I think most paint stores figured out what was happening and don't offer them like this anymore.  But I have this border that I've also used that has the same effect!


Then, I made the paintbrush and added the lettering.  You can find detailed directions on how I made the paintbrush here.  I love how gigantic it is, but don't be scared.  It's really pretty easy and can be done in about 30 minutes or so.


I used this for my Christian education space, but this set of bulletin board letters comes with general education wording as well so it can be used in so many places!


Good Fruits Bulletin Board

This last bulletin board is another colorful and eye catching one!  It's another great back to school bulletin board and interactive too!


I love using this one as a Fruit of the Spirit bulletin board for Sunday School to encourage those traits. But it also works well in public school for character education because it comes with apples to add to the tree as kids are showing that good character trait or fruit.


You can find the set of bulletin board letters with 26 character traits included here.


You can get more details on how to make and use this bulletin board interactively in your classroom in this post.


Looking for an entire year of bulletin boards?  Check out this money saving bundle of bulletin boards for each month.  All 3 of the boards featured in this blog are included!




Are you needing fun and engaging ways to talk about character education in your classroom?  Or are you a Christian teacher wanting to use the Fruit of the Spirit to help with classroom management?  Whether you are teaching in a religious or non-religious setting, this interactive bulletin board is great for encouraging positive student behaviors.


The Fruit of the Spirit is one of my favorite units to teach in preschool Sunday School.  Not only is it fun and yummy, but it is so helpful in encouraging appropriate behaviors.  This bulletin board set goes perfectly with this unit (the fruits even match!) and it's so easy to put up.  


Let's talk about 3 things I absolutely love about using this Fruit of the Spirit bulletin board in the classroom!

1. It's An Easy Peezy Set Up (Cut, Trace, Staple)

Having the templates ready to go make this bulletin board display a breeze to set up.  The bulletin board shown in the video above is a 48x36 board and I used the small size template from the bulletin board set and got to cutting and stapling.

After I stapled it up, I colored in the tiny spaces with black marker (dry erase marker is actually my favorite for this task because it's just so dark) to make it seem like I cut out those way teeny tiny spaces even though my fingers couldn't handle it. :)  It blends in so perfectly that not even my find-every-mistake-I-make 9 year old has found it yet! #winning


Next up was the tree.  I just free handed this one.  But ya'll, don't be impressed.  I'm a terrible artist.  Like way bad.  I can doodle and handletter, but drawing? Nope!  All I did was pull up a cute tree clipart picture and drew with pencil so I could erase a bunch of times and then went over it with marker.  It's not perfect, but it's cute enough!


Still don't have confidence in your free hand skills?  Do what I did in the classroom and pull up your favorite tree clipart on your interactive white board, tape the poster board to it, resize the image to the size you need and TRACE.

  


2. Flexible Wording Options

I have heard from sooooo many of my Christian teacher friends that they want more scripture based bulletin boards that are easy to set up.  But so many of you can't use a Christian based board (or don't want to and that's okay too!)  That's why I'm making each bulletin board in this monthly bundle with lots of wording options.  

There are 3 versions of this bulletin board in this fruits set.  Only one is Christian based.  When finished, it looks like this!




The other 2 are non-religious, Character Ed based like this!


One of the wordings is shown above and the other wording is, "We can bear fruit."


3. It's Interactive!

I love LOVE bulletin boards that I can make interactive with the kids and we can add to or change along the way instead of a bulletin board that's just a wallflower or decoration. :)


This character traits bulletin board set has apples for you to fill out when you see kids showing a specific character trait.  I love using these at the end of the day when we are reflecting on the day.  Maybe we have really focused on one trait a lot, OR maybe we have really struggled with one character trait! So, I will find someone who didn't struggle with that trait and talk about it positively to encourage others to work on that more!



You can find this Character education bulletin board set here and the year of bulletin boards here!




Welcome to 2020.  The year of the pandemic.

And the year we decided to temporarily homeschool our 7 year old.  Homeschool was the right decision right now for us because it came down to the LRE--the least restrictive environment.  It's a term we use in public school for our special needs children.  And it was the idea that we kept coming back to as parents.  Which environment--in person, all virtual, or homeschool--will give Cooper the least restrictive environment.  And the answer every time was homeschool.

Since my 7 year old boy LOVES legos, our homeschool classroom theme became obvious!  And I think it turned out adorably.  Take a look at our lego classroom space!
{This post contains affiliate links which go to support my chocolate and Dr. Pepper addiction! :)}

Our upstairs playroom has the perfectly sized window jut-out area.  It has great natural light and is just the perfect size for a homeschool classroom.  

2nd Grade Lego Sign

The first thing we did is make our "2nd" grade sign for the window sill.  I grabbed these paper mache letters online since I wasn't going in stores, spray painted them black and hot glued random, extra legos to it.  The 2 is a 12" letter and the N & D are 8" letters.

The rest of the window holds our books we are reading that week.  Clearly, this week, we will be enjoying some Frog and Toad!

Lego Head Painted Jars

I ordered rainbow drawers to keep our supplies organized, but I also wanted a few supply jars out.  These lego jars were perfect!

I found a few extra small mason jars.  These are the 8 ounce sized jars.  First, I decided to use craft paint.

You can see that clearly didn't work well.  The paint peeled, and the more coats I tried to add, the worse it got...

So I bought some spray paint and problem solved.  It was so easy and soooo much faster.  I wish I would've done this earlier!

Then, my handy husband cut a 4" cube for me from a left over post scrap he had in his shop.  I did use craft paints to paint this blue and it worked great!!  It took 2-3 coats to get the coloring right.  I wanted it to look like one of the lego heads had a blue shirt lego block and I think it works well!

Aren't the adorable?  I had fun painting the faces and letting my 7 year old paint too! :)

Lego Drawer Pull

In the middle of a work-from-home, school-from-home pandemic, desks are a hot commodity!!

After 2 desk ordering fails, I finally found this desk and this chair at Walmart for under $50.  It's simple and basic, but that's what we needed for this kid space anyway!  (Rainbow drawers are from Amazon.)

I decided to add a drawer pull to it to tie it in to our theme.  

Cooper built a lego droid drawer pull (can you tell his other love is Star Wars??).  We used hot glue to attach it to the drawer, but that didn't last long.  Right now, it's stuck with Gorilla Super Glue.  Fingers crossed this lasts longer!

Lego Bulletin Board

If you have followed my blog for any amount of time, you know I LOVE a good anchor chart.  So having a place to post our learning this year was crucial!  I ordered this cork bulletin board and covered it in black fabric.  Then, I hot glued mega blocks around the border.  I bought this set of mega blocks and I had less than 10 left over so it worked perfectly with this size board.

I drew and cut out the light bulb, and made and printed the text for our big idea.  This is our big idea for the first nine weeks.  I've planned out 4 big ideas for the year!  If you have any of my integrated units, you know I'm a believer in a big idea to connect across all subject areas.  Homeschooling will be no different!

I love how this board turned out!  Soon it will be full of anchor charts and learning.  Follow me on facebook or instagram to see the progress! 

If you love this bulletin board, you can find templates, for 3 lego themed inspirational quotes in this bulletin board set.

I really love our little space and hope it makes for a successful year of 2nd grade!

The first school I taught at was an IB (International Baccalaureate) School.  The primary IB program is big about asking questions to guide the students learning.  In my first grade classroom, we used an "I Wonder" Wall to ask and answer questions about the content we were learning.  This is the perfect place to help little ones understand what a question is and practice asking, writing, and answer questions. 

Here's a look at the routines for our first grade Wonder Wall.

Question Words

At the beginning of the year, we talk about our attitude words and what good learners do (Read about that here.)  When we talk about being curious, or an inquirer, we brainstorm question words.

I don't have a picture of my original anchor chart, but basically, I have a poster size question mark and I add these question word cards to the question.  There are some years that I just add the question cards around the I Wonder Wall bulletin board.

We spend some time asking questions and writing questions using these question words.  Then, the cards stay up all year on this bulletin board to help kids brainstorm questions they are wondering about our learning.

Key Concepts

In the IB curriculum, key concepts are attached to the content units you teach.  For example, when we taught weather, one of our key concepts was causation.  Many of our essential questions were causation questions.

Each of the key concepts are copied onto color card stock and put on the Wonder Wall.  Here is the original board from years ago so you can see the layout.  Ignore the "outdatedness" of it! :)

I Am An Inquirer

When we talk about being an inquirer at the beginning of the year, each kid makes a kid diecut to match them.  I add them to the Wonder Wall with a speech bubble around the bulletin board.

This is each child's space to add questions.  When they have a question about what we are learning, this is where it goes.

If we are learning the content whole group and they have an unanswered question, they can ask it and I will write it on a sticky note with the class and we will stick it on that persons bubble.

If students think of questions during other times of the day, they can write it on the sticky note themselves.  I let them do this if they finish work early, or if they go to our Big Idea station (where they are reading books about our content topic.)

Wondering Wednesday

I try to keep an eye on our questions and we look over them as we study our big idea.  Sometimes I might add a lesson or book in to answer a particular question that I think is important for the whole group.

Other times we take a "Wondering Wednesday" and google answers to our unanswered questions.  This is usually what we do with the left over questions at the end of the unit.

As questions are answered, we talk about what kind of question it is.  This is so we can sort the question under the key concept it matches.  Depending on our content topic, some key concepts will be fuller than others.  For example, in our weather unit, most of the questions will be causation questions because that just naturally goes with the topic.

We record the answer to the question together on a light bulb and a move the question and answer under the appropriate key concept.  Depending on your kids, and definitely for older kids, this is something they could research and answer on their own during a "Wondering Wednesday."

All of the materials you need for you own I Wonder Wall bulletin board can be found here.

Last year, I redecorated my church Sunday School classroom with a rainbow theme.  You can see the entire room here.

Since that time, I've had lots of questions about how I made this paintbrush bulletin board.  So, I thought I'd just blog a little how-to on this colorful bulletin board.  It's truly one of the favorites I've ever made!
{This post contains affiliate links to add to my chocolate addiction and support my corner of cyberspace!}

First, I covered my bulletin board with black fabric and paint swatches.  I just went to my local hardware store and grabbed a paint swatch for red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple and got enough copies of each color to go around my entire bulletin board.

Then, I made the paintbrush.  I used a brown posterboard and silver metallic posterboard to draw and make the paintbrush.  Yes, I just freehanded it.  First, with pencil so I could erase and redo and erase and redo! :)  And then, I went over it with a big fat sharpie marker.  I added some lines and dots on the gray to make it more realistic...I actually used my 1 inch hole punch to punch black circles to glue on.  NO, it's not perfect, but I like it just fine and think the imperfections add to the whimsy of it!

Next, I stapled the brown and silver posterboard up.  I did NOT staple the bottom so I could attach the brushes.

Then, I bought cheap, plastic table covers in rainbow colors.  I gathered one color at a time, bunched it some to make it look pleated, and then stapled it under the brush.  Then, I let the length just hang for now.  You really don't need much length of this, so if you have something else to use scrap plastic cloth for, there is plenty to save!  Or you can split it with a friend that wants to make the same bulletin board!



Once all the colors were stapled under the brush, I stapled the bottom of the brush down to finish that up.  Then, I trimmed all of the plastic table covers across the bottom of my bulletin board.  You can cut them to any length you want.  I used my scissors to add bristles at the bottom to finish it off a little better than just a straight cut.

After the paintbrush was finished, it was time to add the words.

I added a Bible verse since this is my church classroom.  You can use these same fonts that I used to create your own words:
*KG Sorry Not Sorry Chub
*CC Blurred Limes
*CC Pitcher Perfect

Or I have this Bible verse (Ephesians 2:10) and some secular options available already made for you right here!

Just print and cut!  PRO-TIP: Cut with a little bit of a white space around the font to make it stand out even better instead of cutting directly on the black line.

I did not laminate these letters.  But on the cursive words, I did leave some of the "inside parts" there instead of cutting them out and just colored them in with black sharpie.  #lifesaver #thinfontprobs

I just adore how it turned out!  Grab this bulletin here or an entire year of bulletin board templates here.
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