Bulletin Board Ideas

Many teachers feel the pressure of creating new bulletin boards in and out of their classrooms each month. I strongly agree with the necessity to publish often; however, starting a new genre study each month is not manageable or recommended. Consider creating a permanent bulletin board that updates the school community on the work that is going on in students' Writing Folders and Writers' Notebooks.

K–1 IDEA: What Is Going on in Our Writing Folders?
Ask students to select their favorite piece of writing from their folders and describe the "kind" of writing it represents. Support them in making generalizations about writing. For example, if a student says, "I wrote about my birthday party," you could say, "You captured a special moment in your writing." A student might say, "I made this for my mom." This translates to writing with an audience in mind. You might hear a student say, "I wrote about transformers." In this instance the student is using one of his or her passions to inspire writing.

Put copies of students' work on a bulletin board and add sentence strips with your generalizations about writing as captions for their work. Keep the heading the same on the bulletin board each month, but change the work and the focus of the question you ask the students.

For a nice video on generating creative bulleting boards, check out the Schoolwide Network Now.

2–5 IDEA: Excerpts From Our Writers' Notebooks
On a monthly basis, ask students to select an entry from their Writers' Notebooks that reflects their best "notebook" work. Have them prepare their pieces for publication by revising them for sense and clarity, and editing them according to your editing checklist. Once they have done this have them use their best handwriting to rewrite their work on publishing paper. (Click here for a sample.)

Ask students a question like one of the following: What kind notebook writing does this piece best display? What is the strongest element of this piece? What publishing possibilities does this piece have? Have them write their responses on sentence strips. Post the finished pieces along with the sentences strips on the bulletin board.

The work that goes into and is displayed on these types of bulletin boards are valuable and standard bearing. The ELA standards this type of bulletin board meets include: students reflect on their work often; students write for a variety of purposes, intentions and audiences; students go through various stages of the writing process.

To see how to select an entry from your writer's notebook, check out this great video by literacy consultant Ilene Cohn at www.schoolwidenetwork.com.

Contributed By Michelle Wolf