If you have ever taught a class or if you have ever had to do anything in a classroom, you know how important the classroom is to the learning environment. When you were a kid you probably saw interesting things on the walls of your classroom. Classrooms that were well decorated interested you and the ones that were bland just seemed boring. Your brightest memories of elementary or high school probably involve a colorful classroom and a warm and interesting teacher. The teachers make the difference, but so do the classrooms that they decorate. A big part of classrooms are their bulletin boards. Let’s face it, the walls are the primary spot for decoration in most buildings, and school classrooms are no exception. This means that a well decorated classroom will really be a classroom with some great bulletin boards. These boards are more than just decoration. They teach important ideas and make learning fun. If you are a teacher or a concerned parent you know that you need to make a difference in the lives of the children around you by creating good bulletin boards. But what makes a good bulletin board? Often bulletin boards focus on a single theme, like a holiday, for example. Recently people have been asking me about good ideas for valentine’s day bulletin boards. Here are some ideas that occurred to me:
1. This will depend on the age of the students you are teaching, but a really great idea for Valentine’s Day in a classroom is to turn your bulletin board into a candy valentine for each student. Cut out heart shaped pieces of paper and fix each child’s favorite candy to them. This makes a beatiful and varied bulletin board, but it also gives the children a special treat.
2. Have the children make the bulletin board. Explain that you want a bulletin board that expresses something about love or friendship and then allow each child to paint, draw or write on some portion of the bulletin board. This will result in a remarkable rainbow of expression in your classroom that the children have made themselves.
3. Think of a Valentine’s Day theme and then focus your bulletin board around it. One possiblity I thought of was to write a story on the bulletin board about Valentine’s Day. Have the students read different parts of the story out loud. This allows students to participate in the bulletin board and to be creative about the way they tell the story.
4. Another thing to do is to transform the bulletin board into a game board. Here is one game idea that you might want to try: have the childred draw two identical symbols on different pieces of paper. Then play a memory game where the papers are turned over on the bulletin board and the children have to guess to find out where the matches are. Tell the children to make their drawing something Valentine’s related.
These are just a few possiblities among many that you could use to decorate your Valentine’s Day bulletin board. Be creative and colorful. Kid’s will be really impressed by something large and well thought out. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of a child. They will know if you have really put some time and effort into something or if you have just thrown something together at the last moment. The sky is literally the limit when it comes to designing bulletin boards for Valentine’s Day. Ask your students what they would like to see on the bulletin boards. After all, its their board to.
