Skip to main content

Bulletin Boards - A Foreign Concept

I announced to my team that I'm not very good with bulletin boards because they are "a foreign concept". 

I've been away from New Zealand for more than ten years so I wondered if it was still true. 

 I googled "Bulletin board New Zealand" and found pictures that were from American schools. 

We don't do bulletin boards in New Zealand. Why not?

 Our walls are for the children's work. 

 When asked if I was going to "do your bulletin board" (the one outside my classroom) my reply was, "I thought I'd just leave up what's there." What there was a piece of art done by a group of children at the end of the school year, mostly to use up the old paints. 

 One of the new children asked about the piece of art during his school visit. "What's that?" 

 I replied, "It's a painting. Some children did it with brushes and combs." It's true, they had used combs on the paint.

 He added, "And their hands." He was right. There were a couple of hand prints around the outside of the art work. "And their face," he added. 

 "Yep," I agreed. "They might have got paint on their face."

 It was a bulletin board created by children. It showed that we value art process. 

 It wasn't made by the teacher. It was made by the children. 

 And it provided an interesting interaction - a valuable outcome of a bulletin board.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Journals & Writing

We like to write about what interests us.  It's the same for children.  Journal writing time is an invitation for the children to draw something of interest to them.  They tell me something about their pictures and I write it on the page.  They see how writing happens by starting with an idea then seeing it get written down.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Block House

To help keep "THE BLOCK HOUSE" safe we moved the shelf away from the wall to the other side of the carpet providing a new, and safer, space for the house to be built. The letters: THE BLOCK HOUSE were written on A4 paper and attached to the bulletin board. Some of the children were interested in the letters and matching them with the names of the children in the class. The letter "A" had to be added because there are 5 children who begin with the letter A in our classroom this year.
Post a Comment
Read more

Yarn Trap

The yarn was used to make a trap.  It was tied to a picture frame and a basket. Each was positioned on shelves across from one another.  The children had to go "under" the trap to get to the carpet for whole class time. There was a lot of sharing of ideas, problem solving, and use of the positional language "over" and "under" and "around".
Post a Comment
Read more