Bulletin boards are more than a way to decorate the school, they reflect the identity of the school or classroom. An eye catching bulletin board will build interest in every student and help students make connections to one another. An effective bulletin board can foster a sense of belonging within a learning community, either the individual classroom or the whole school.
Benefits of a Whole School Bulletin Board
Displaying student work lets them know that you value their work and them. Sometimes teachers struggle with creating cutesy bulletin boards that look beautiful but don’t really reflect the learners in our school. They become more teacher-centered instead of student-centered.
My fifth grade team was recently tasked with signing up to be in charge of creating something to showcase for our community bulletin board in our school’s main hallway for one month. We decided to do the month of December, thinking it would be an easier month to pick a theme.
Warm Up With a Good Book Theme- Whole School Bulletin Board
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We ended up having a really hard time deciding on something that our entire school, including kindergarten, could create for the whole school bulletin board. We went from gingerbread men (baking up a batch of smart cookies!), to snowflakes, to snowman to finally settling on mugs and book recommendations.
We had a few challenges in designing this bulletin board. First, we are a Kindergarten through Fifth Grade school of about 450 students. In order for everyone to have something to display, we would need space for 450 mugs.
The second challenge was the age appropriate expectations of everyone being able to write a recommendation on a small sized mug. This is a challenge for first grade, who typically needs a lot of space and lines to guide their writing. Kindergarten was a challenge in handwriting altogether. Can they write? What does it look like? What kind of spacing are we talking about?
Every time I speak with a kindergarten teacher, I walk away with a deep appreciation that I teach older kids who know key important things like the difference between lunch and a snack and how to get to the gym on their own.
Whole School Bulletin Board Modifications
I am so excited with how our ‘Warm Up With a Good Book’ whole school bulletin board turned out! I created a few different templates to fit the needs of the various ages we were dealing with. First, I created the intermediate level mugs for our third, fourth and fifth grade classes. I printed them two to a page, so they are roughly half the size of the other mugs.
I created a few different mug templates so each student would have a unique looking mug.
The primary grades were given a larger mug, printed one mug per page. The increased size allowed for extra writing spaces.
Finally the kindergarteners did a whole class activity. They voted on their favorite classroom book and each kindergarten student decorated a marshmallow. I love the adorable little marshmallows kindergarten created.
We also have a specialized academic classroom that consists of students who typically struggle with fine motor skills. They also created a whole class mug and each student decorated their own marshmallow.
Bulletin Board Size and Border
We ended up using two bulletin boards that are next to each other. They are the same size and measure 240 centimeters wide by 120 centimeters high. We split the letters in the phrase using, ‘Warm Up With’ on one board and ‘A Good Book’ on the other. We then connected the two by putting the kindergarten class mugs on a sheet of construction paper and placed them between the two boards. Finally we finished the board off with a white bulletin board border. Measuring the bulletin board helped us to know that while 36 feet sounds like a lot of border, it would not be enough. We ordered two sets from Amazon.
This created enough space to display the entire school’s book recommendations.
Final Product
I love that every student at school was able to create either a mug or a marshmallow and add their own little piece to our community bulletin board.
Every time my class takes a bathroom break we line up by this bulletin board. It is such a joy to see the students looking to see where their mugs ended up on the bulletin board as well as looking for their siblings or friends mugs.
Check out my ‘Warm Up With A Good Book‘ winter bulletin board set on Teachers Pay Teachers if you would like this for your own school or classroom.
