Aside from holding up the ceiling, walls can serve several purposes in your classroom. They can help to make the room a warm and inviting space in which kids feel comfortable. They can support learning, and they can show off student work. Here are some ideas for decorating yours:
Make your walls colorful. Most teachers use butcher paper, but I’ve also seen wrapping paper and fabric. Consider which colors you want to use a lot. Different colors set different moods. Here is an excellent article on room color and mood. It is written for homes, not classrooms, so you need to scroll down to get to the color info.
Devoting a wall to a subject that you are currently studying is a great way to keep your walls interesting and fresh. You can include key points, vocabulary, brainstorms, student work, and anything else that seems to fit. This article has some great pictures of several focus walls.
Need ideas? Kathy Schrock has compiled an extensive list of bulletin board ideas.
Lots of student work not only livens your classroom but also gives students a sense of ownership. Be sure and enlist those parent helpers to take down and put up student work. One easy way to display student work is to make a bulletin board with a piece of dark blue or black construction paper for each child. Put two large paperclips on the top of each piece of paper. When you use the paperclips to hang student work, the construction paper becomes a frame. Much easier to deal with than staples or thumbtacks.
Let kids write on the wall. IdeaPaint allows you to make any wall into a dry-erase board. Here is an article with some good pictures.
For more ideas, be sure to check out the rest of the Creative Classroom Series.
Check back next week for the next installment: Making a Puzzle Center.
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