Bulletin Boards

My favorite part of being a second year teacher so far is being able to take what I did last year and make it better. I had a poster of the "Mighty Writing Process" (from Brad Wilcox) last year and my kids clipped their clothespin to the sides of the poster to show their present stage. It was a nice way for me to keep track of the kids who needed extra support or extensions. I liked it, but I wished there was a better way to use this method and label each stage with proper names.

This year I just didn't have any free wall space to hang the poster, so I cut it up and rearranged it to create a writing process bulletin board.

 
The reading tests we give our students have a survey portion which asks the students to list the books they have read lately. They score higher on the test if they list books from multiple genres, so I encourage my students to read a wide variety of books. When I talked to my kids last year about reading genres they just looked at me like I had stopped speaking English. I found some genre posters on Pinterest (as well as some comprehension strategy posters) and went to work. Hopefully this year my kids will have a better idea of what it means to read from multiple genres!

I love using looks like/sounds like charts to discuss the habits we'll have in our classroom. I find that my kids are much more aware of how they behave when they get to be part of the discussion as we set up how our classroom will look and sound. I use a dry erase marker to fill out the chart as we discuss each habit, then erase it in January and we do it all over again as if it's a new school year.

This is my new favorite bulletin board. I like to post the learning objectives for each week, but last year they were kind of all over the place on both of my white boards. This year I created a bulletin board to organize them for students to see what we will be learning each week.