This was me right out of student teaching 5 years ago. I thought everything in my room needed to look perfect and attractive. I slowly learned, that I needed every inch...no centimeter of space available to foster learning. Now, those adorable bulletin board packages from all the teacher supply stores brightened up my room, but I noticed a few things. Most of the time, the text was too small for the students to see. They also took up a lot of space on the walls. Most importantly, the students rarely used them.
I slowly learned that I needed to take charge and get my students engaged in and interacting with these displays. Goodbye hundreds of dollars spent on borders. Hello engaged students.
The following three examples are from the year I taught fifth grade. My students loved these boards and were always referring and adding to them.
This board was actually next to my desk and because I lacked bulletin or white board space, was taped to the wall. I included some posters about the Civil War with the Essential Understanding questions above them. We referred to these Essential Understandings throughout the unit and related each lesson to one of them. This board stayed up for the whole unit. Students would constantly take yellow post-its with questions they had. I would try my best to find the answers to these questions and covered them in upcoming lessons. The students also used blue post-its to record information they learned and found interesting.
This next picture is of a closet I converted to a white board...because again....no useable space. The white board is actually from Really Good Stuff and came in a large roll with an adhesive back. With this board, I used it as a review to reinforce the equation for finding the size of interior angles in regular polygons. After learning how and why this formula works, I created this chart on my closet. I started off by writing town the names and number of sides for a few polygons. Every day I would add a couple more. At first, I had students arguing over who got to write it. Then I just began to draw names at random.
The last example I have for you goes back to the Civil War. During the unit, I dedicated half of my main white board to this word wall. As we heard a significant word that related to the Civil War, students wrote it down under the corresponding letter. At the end of the unit, I had the students create ABCs of the Civil War books. They were able to reference this board to help them and on each page were required to write the word, describe why it is significant, and draw a picture. Please disregard the bar graph and the "Easiest Books List" that the students created. This was for a school-wide reading program and my class wanted to be the only class where everyone read each selected book. :-)
Well, you can clearly see that my room was probably not the most attractive that year, and with me being so organized, was difficult to spend my days in. Many times I look back to pictures of my first classroom where everything was perfect, but I am proud at how my fifth graders took responsibility of their own learning.
Do you use interactive boards in your classroom? What have you found to be successful?
Do you use interactive boards in your classroom? What have you found to be successful?
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