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

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.

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".

Tape Man

Some of the children put blue tape over their mouth. Usually I would have said something like, "Take the tape off your mouth. It's not for putting on your mouth." Instead I thought of Tape Man (with some pride, being from New Zealand). I thought of creativity. I thought of art. So we sat together for whole group time, some with tape on their mouth. I said, "I've got something to show you." When they first say him one of them said, "It's scary." I reassured them that it's not too scary and that he's being funny. So they started to laugh. Pretty soon there was no more tape on mouths (not that I minded if there was, it's just hard to laugh). Thank you Tape Man for reminding us that creativity begins with exploration in play.

NZ Teacher

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