Bulletin Board Ideas

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One of the best parts of being a teacher is using your creativity to develop meaningful and inspirational bulletin boards to help transform your classroom into a place that fosters caring and learning. Here are a few ideas of our class bulletin boards...
Historical Heroes
This is a bulletin board that changes every month, depending upon what our cultural study is about. Check out the Equity Calendar to see some of the other cultural heroes that we focus on throughout the year.

I try to match up some quality pictures with good descriptions, books, magazines, posters, and other items that the students can check out to learn more about these heroes.
Buff Math
As a graduate of the University of Colorado, this bulletin board is especially dear to my heart! I have always been a big sports fan, and as a kid I really enjoyed reading sports statistics, memorizing team records, and following my favorite teams. When I began teaching, I realized that many of my students enjoyed the same things.

A group of 3rd grade students inspired me to start "Buff Math". We follow the CU football team each season, track their stats, and graph their progress. Here are some of the different types of data we collect:
  • Team wins vs. losses (tally marks)
  • Total yards vs. opponent yards (place value/greater than, less than)
  • Win tracking (bar graph)
  • Run yards vs. pass yards (pie chart)
    • Obviously you can track any team with this same process. The other great thing is that when I asked the CU Football department if they could help us out with some free schwag to help me promote the program, they sent us free tickets to a CU game!
    The Playground
    I don't know if you would really count this as a bulletin board, but as part of our "Red Rubber Ball" unit, I like to have the students turn our morning meeting area into "The Playground".

    It's very easy to set up. Just throw some black paper up on the wall, and then have the students draw on the paper with sidewalk chalk. Definitely use some hairspray to help the chalk adhere to the paper or else you will have a lot of messy shirts in your class!
    Tree of Encouragement
    My mentor Sandy got me interested in the idea of teaching children how to encourage one another. Last year we put up "The Tree of Encouragement" in the room and had students add "leaves" to the tree throughout the year.

    I start off the year by writing making leaves for the students (in Autumn colors) that say, "Dear Suzie..." with an encouraging personalized note. After a few months of this activity, I have the students in the Spring start to write these leaves for one another. Sometimes it is a daunting task to teach kids how to write meaningful, encouraging words and not just, "You're cool!" They love this project.
    Food Pyramid
    We used this food pyramid during our study of health and nutrition. I gathered lots of grocery stores ads from people around the school, and then had the students divide up the items that we cut out into the different food groups.

    We also made a separate poster that talked about "Yummy but Yucky Foods" where the students added junk food and other items that give no nutritional value. There was also a poster where we brainstormed various activities and exercises the students could perform to burn calories!