Bulletin Boards Can Make or Break a Classroom

At the beginning of the year, one of the most important things for teachers to do is decorate and organize the classroom. You can walk down any school's hallway and notice teachers and their aides officially working on bulletin boards before, after, and sometimes even during school hours. It is not unusual for some teachers to spend up to 40 hours on a bulletin board per teaching year. One of the reasons for this is because the bulletin board is the best way to get messages across to children and to display their work. Forty hours a week is too much, but there are some shortcuts to getting these bulletin boards laid out.

When you're making a bulletin board, especially in the classroom, you don't want to use too many bright colors, large cartoon figures or anything that might distract the children. Bright colors, especially in a special education classroom, will keep those young children off task and gazing at the pictures instead of looking at the work.

You also don't want to teach with bulletin boards because they usually don't work as teaching tools. A child will look at the bulletin board and usually just read it. He may make a comment on it, but it's not successful for teaching. If a teacher uses a calendar bulletin board, this too is a distraction for the students. They may be counting the days until spring break or the end of school. It's also a waste of space. A teacher's desk calendar or planner can have better functionality than a wall bulletin board with a calendar on it.

The teacher will put up a bulletin board and sometimes the children will just ignore it because they had no hand or saying in it. If you let the children have a say in what goes on the bulletin board and how the room is to be decorated, with you as the final judge, they will be more in tune to what the board actually means and what the it is trying to convey.