Year Long Bulletin Boards

It is almost back to school time and that means getting your room ready. Do you love to do bulletin boards? Hate them? Well I am here to share with you what I do. I have a do them once and I’m done policy for the entire year. Really, I’m not kidding.

I am super excited to be joining Ashley from Schroeder Shenanigans and Angie fromLucky Little Learners for their #2getherwearebetter link up all about those lovely bulletin boards. They put out an invite on Periscope, if you haven’t checked it out yet you totally should, to join them in August and September and share our bulletin boards and classroom reveals. Well I jumped at the chance, I'm so excited to team up with these and so many dynamic teacher bloggers.  

This month’s topic of bulletin boards can be fun for some and quite daunting for others. I love seeing all those beautiful theme bulletin boards all over Pinterest and although it seems like it would be so fun, I do like to craft, to have a new board or two every month, but let’s just get real. I am too set in my ways and lazy, if I am being honest, to change mine every month.  

So you may be asking what do I do? I want my room to look good and it must be functional, but I was looking for a way to do the work once and not have to do it again. Well, that is just what I do. I think bulletin boards should serve two purposes. Display student work and give relevant information that we are working on. We don’t have hallways at our school so all we have to worry about is inside our room, which helps lessen the load.

I have 2 boards to display student work in my room.  These both are super easy and nothing earth shattering. I saw this idea on Pinterest several years back. I have scrapbook paper, fadeless so it will last, one for each student up on the board. Then I have a clothespin, that I hot clued a thumbtack to the back of, hung above each piece of scrapbook paper. This allows me to put up new student pieces easily.

(This one doesn’t have the clothes pins yet, I am putting the new students names on them for this year.)

I usually put up new work every 2 weeks or so and almost always one of them is an art piece to do with our current theme so that is the decoration for our room.

 My room is a jungle theme so I chose titles for my boards to go along with that to keep it fun. To make my titles I took cute scrapbook paper and used our Ellison die cut machine to cut out all my letters. Then I put the cut out letters on another piece of scrapbook paper as a mat. Finally I laminated them for durability. If you use the fadeless paper they will last a long time. These two boards have been up in my room for going on 3 years now and still look fantastic!

The next fun board I have is another Pinterest find. What did we do before Pinterest?? Hahaha! Anywho, I don’t have the original pin since I have been using it since way before I started blogging, but here is another one I found. (Click here)

It uses duck tape, get what matches your room, and ziplock bags. You then make a “quilt” with as many squares as you need. Then each month I pick the students best piece of writing and slide it in the back of my quilt and back up on the wall it goes. It looks super cute and I made it once and again I have been using it over 3 years now.

This is what it would like like empty. (above)Then once it is filled with student work. (below)

 Besides student work boards my other most important board is my focus board (wall). This shows the students the concepts we are working on for the week. I think it is key for my littles to know what we are working on. They love it to. I put the new concepts up each Monday and they are always excited to come in and the see what we will be doing for the week.

I hung one piece of scrapbook paper, are you sensing a theme here…lol, for each area that I want to highlight. It is laminated and I put a title on the top, that I can change out over the course of the year with just a few staples. Then all of my letters, sight words, numbers, shapes, blends, digraphs…you get the picture I have printed out and laminated as well. I have them clipped together in order by weeks in my file cabinet. Friday after school I pull out our new concepts and staple them up, easy peasy lemon squeezy.

 In my room wall space is at a premium. I have 3 large windows, I do love all the natural light,  and 4, yes 4, doors. My room was pretty small and last year when we got rid of our school computer lab next door to me, since we have computers in the classes 1:1, they took down the wall and expanded my room. Long explanation I know, but that is why I have 4 doors, lol. Anyway, I have to get creative to be able to display everything I need.  SO here it is, get a hot glue gun and USE it everywhere!

Yes I use almost every cabinet in my room to display information that we need. I even hot glue things to my doors. It peels off easy and you can change it out with out a big sticky mess, like tape, and it stays up. I even hot glue art pieces to my windows for decoration. My janitor was skeptical, but I assured him, it will come off no problem.

So going with this hot glue idea and cabinets I have just a few more things to share with you. (I just can’t figure out how to write short posts, lol).

For my birthday board I used the side of my file cabinet, Again I chose a saying that went with my jungle theme and I have one circle for each month with a ribbon in my room colors. Then on the first day of school I will be taking a picture of all the students with birthdays in each month. They will be holding a sign with their birthday (ex. 15^th). Then those pictures will be put under each month of the year. Done. They love seeing each others pictures and go look at it often.

What do you do with all those wonderful pictures and letters your students give you. I made a board on my supply cabinet to hang them. Yes, I hot glued cork board and my title squares and now I just use thumb tacks to hang up my treasures. It is great to look at when you have had a rough day as well.

Like I said, hot glue is your friend, lol. Don't be afraid to use it. Every nook and cranny in your room can be bulletin board space.

I hope that you have gotten a few ideas that you can use in your room this year. I would love to read your comments and thoughts on what boards you plan to use in your room this year. Then head back over to the linky and see all the other fantastic ideas. Thanks again Ashley and Angie for this #2getherwearebetter linky. You guys totally rock!

Five for Friday~Spiders Galore & So Much More!

I can’t believe it is Friday already.  The weeks are just flying by.  I guess that’s what happens when you’re having fun.  I will admit I hate it when that alarm clock goes off at 5AM, but once I am up I am excited to see what the day will bring.  Kindergarten is a new adventure everyday.

 

Today I am linking up once again with the fabulous Kacey at Doodle bugs teaching for this weeks 5 for Friday.

Here is a peek at our focus wall for the week.  We are making our way through the alphabet, this week was R and S. 

Yes, we skipped Q.  I go back to that and teach Qu.  They are married ya know and so they are always together…always.  We make it a super fun week. Anywho…here are our letter circle maps for the week.

Mr. Greg, from The KindergartenSmorgasbord had a great idea to make a book using pictures of your circle maps once you have gone through the entire alphabet.  Lucky for me I have been taking pics each week.  I think it will be a favorite in our library.

Another one of the things we have been focusing on is our reading stamina.  Once we hit the 5 minute mark I gave each little their own whisper phone to use. 

They were so excited.  If you want to make your own like I did check out my tutorial here.  They were super easy.  They really help my kiddos hear how they are pronouncing their words, it is especially helpful for my ELL’s.  But…we are stuck at the 10 minute mark.  Any suggestions??  I stopped even counting my 2 little’s that are on IEP’s otherwise we would still be stuck at about 7 min.  I just stay close to them and redirect quickly when they start to get off task so the other students won’t see it.  About ¾ of my other students I know could go much longer, but I have some real young ones that just can’t get past 10…ugh!  Help!

Another highlight of our week was a visit from our reading buddies.  Every other week our 5^th grade reading buddies come for a visit. 

It is so beneficial for both groups.  It builds confidence and leadership in the upper graders and allows my littles to feel special that the “big” kids come to read just to them.  Many of my higher kiddos can now read a book back to their buddy and you should see their smiles!  They are so proud of themselves.  Next visit we are planning an art project together, it should be lots of fun.

Do you do sharing in your class??  We do and it is a fantastic way to build listening and speaking skills.  Each child has an assigned day that they can bring something to share.  I have some black tote bags they take out to their backpack to put their item in and bring in, so it is a secret from the other students.  They choose 3 clues at home about their item.  Then I help them read each of their clues.  We give a clue, they choose 3 students to guess, then the next clue and guesses, etc.  Once they reveal their item I usually ask a few other questions of them. 

The kiddos love it and it usually only takes about 5-7 minutes of our day, but it is so worth it.  They are becoming so much more comfortable talking in front of the class.  To be honest they don’t always remember to bring something on “their day” so sometimes it goes even quicker.  I got this fantastic idea of using the 3 clues from the wonderful Kim Adsit, in her Ultimate Open HousePack.

One of the things that makes my job so rewarding are the wonderful notes and pictures of love that I receive from my kiddos.  How do you keep yours??  This year I created a little bulletin board area on one of my cabinets to display them.  

The kiddos love seeing their artwork displayed and it is always a great thing to look at if I am having a "tuff" day...lol.

Our main focus this week was all about Spiders.  I don't do Halloween because I have kiddos who don't celebrate, but we study spiders, pumpkins, and bats during October. 

We had a blast learning with some fun thrown in there too. We started off by putting our schema on our spider interactive chart. Then we read several books and watched several videos all about spiders.  Next we added our new learning to our interactive chart.

Then we made these fantastic All About Spider books from Deanna Jump's unit.  We unscrambled the sentences, glued them in our book and then drew a matching illustration.  They did a fantastic job!

We are working on our first word family -at.  So we completed this super cute craftivity with all of the -at words that we came up with. 

These are a FREEBIE from Susan Jones at Thank God it's First Grade.  They came out super cute!

We had to do some spider writing. This was perfect to help support those kiddos they are still needing a prompt.  While my above level kiddos could add additional sentences on their own. 

These were the great idea of Miss Kindergarten Love.  You can get her FREEBIE mini unit here.

We also had a great time with our Math and Literacy centers from my new pack Spiders Galore .  One of their favorite things to do is write the room.  So we're reviewing all of our important spider vocabulary as we wrote our words from around the room.

We did some rhyming practice by matching the spider card with it's rhyming web card.  My high students then drew pictures and sounded out the words to the matches that they found.

We also did number and tally mark matching, a counting spiders around the room activity, measuring spiders, unscrambling spider sentences and so much more. Unfortunately I had to do assessments during center time so I wasn't unable to take more great pics of our center fun.  But here are some previews of this unit so you can check them out.  

We ended our week with one final craft.  We had learned all about spider webs so we made some of our own.  They couldn't have been easier.  Draw your web with a pencil on your black paper.  Trace your drawing with glue.  Add glitter, yes glitter and dump of the excess.  Ta Da!  Beautiful spider webs where everyone was able to be creative and feel successful.

As a reward for making it through this marathon post leave me a comment with your email and I will giveaway one of my new Spiders Galore Math & Literacy Centers. We have a big weekend of racing so I will pick a winner when I get home Sunday night!  

So what were you up to this week?  I would love to hear all about it!  Be sure to check out the linky and see what everyone else has been up to this week.

~Laura