Lettering for Classroom Displays

Feb 16

Posted by Linda in lettering | No Comments

alphabet letters

Ready-made lettering  for classroom displays has improved quite a bit over the last few years. Several companies offer pre-printed, punch-out letter sets that can be very useful. The letters are printed on card and can be re-used several times. Packs of letters usually contain over 200 letters and numbers in quite a good mix of upper and lower cases. There is nothing wrong with using material like this to speed up your displays. You do need to choose carefully though so that your lettering either matches or provides an interesting contrast with any other text on your display.

We all know you can get pdfs to print yourself that seem cheaper or even free but remember you need to take account of the time taken in cutting out and the cost of colour printing them. Drawing  letters using templates is not really free either and also has a cost, often in valuable teaching assistant time. Time that should have been spent working with children.

5 Top Tips for Using Pre-Printed Letters on Your Displays

  1. Use a craft knife for removing the letters from the card. They can tear if you just try to pop them out.
  2. Laminate them for longer life. Not vital but this does increase the lifetime of your letter sets.
  3. Less is more. Use them sparingly on displays, only for main titles. If you need to say more print it out and mount it on an information sheet using a contrasting font. Remember try to stick to 2, or at most 3, fonts on any display.
  4. Choose a letter set that compliments the rest of your display. If it is a multi-coloured letter set try to pick up just one of the colours in the mounts around children’s work.
  5. Watch your letter placement. If they are supposed to be in a straight line do yourself a faint chalk mark first. (Use two drawing pins and a bit of chalked string to create your straight line, then brush it off after.)

Buy Ready Made Lettering for Classroom Displays

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Fair Trade Classroom Display Design

Feb 3

Posted by Linda in displays advice | No Comments

One of our readers had a problem. Hannah wrote:

>hiya saw your website with a variety of different classroom displays, and i was wondering if you had any ideas for the classroom display i have to do, i work in a nursery/reception mixed and have to do a fair trade display moulded around the letters in the alphabet, at the moment i am struggling please can you help. thankyou hannah

I love a display challenge so I had a think and a look round at a few Fair Trade resource sites.  Then it was out with my favourite sketching software to mock up a quick design.

The idea is you use a mix of products – some with the fair trade logo & some without. Helps to get past having to find 26 fairtrade products. As it’s for early years you might just use the letter and not the words.

Children then help you decide which ones go in the trolley. Use string to lead from pictures to trolley for the ones that fit. Maybe even make a 3d basket and put the appropriate letters in? Play with the idea till you get something you like.

You could use a mix of children’s drawings, photos and carefully re-cycled product wrappers for the products themselves. Maybe link it with  a shop in a role play area?

I hope this helps & send me a photo of what you do decide to do! Sometimes just asking someone and seeing their ideas gets your own design juices flowing :-)

Useful Fairtrade related web sites with lots of lovely free resources:
http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/schools/support_resources/default.aspx
http://www.globaldimension.org.uk/resourcesearch/results.aspx?selTopic=38&rs=top
http://www.cafod.org.uk/primary/eyfs-and-ks1

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Snowflakes for Classroom Displays

Nov 27

Posted by Linda in winter | No Comments

Make a Snowflake Display

Paper snowflakes from WikiHow

Classroom Displays group member Natalie was having a difficult day in her library so she abandoned her plans and made snowflakes with her students instead.  Natalie used instructions from another well known site but if she had searched the Classroom Displays group she would have found this really useful tutorial for the same design from another member, Liz. Click on the image to go to LizMarie’s detailed instructions.

make a snowflake

I made these snowflakes myself from LizMarie’s tutorial with a year 3 class a few years ago and they found the instructions very easy to follow. The effect is quite impressive, fits well with the Year 3 pattern making thread, and it is generally great fun!

You can see Natalie’s students are quite a bit older and they obviously enjoyed themselves too!

Snowflakes

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Interesting Ways to Make Your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn

Nov 13

Posted by Linda in displays advice | No Comments

Classroom Displays group member  Tom Barrett has done a whole series of collaborative slideshows for teachers and his latest is all about making your classroom a fabulous sparkly learning environment.

The slide show will keep growing and over time become a great place for pooling ideas. There’s not much there yet but these slide shows of Tom’s just keep growing so come back in a month and there might be 30 or 40 tips there. You can see what people have contributed so far by looking through but better yet, why not join in and add your own ideas?

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Colourful Displays – A Mexican Marketplace

Oct 31

Posted by Linda in Art | No Comments

Mexican Marketplace welcome Just look at these stunning classroom displays based on a Mexican market from Classroom Displays group member Painted Paper . Aren’t they amazing?

The colours  of the children’s work are so vibrant they just jump off the walls at you.

The work has been sympathetically displayed and carefully mounted.

Whilst at first glace, there seem to be lots of clashing colours, the colour palette the children have worked with has been chosen with great care. They’ve actually worked with a quite limited range of clear unmixed, mostly hot colours which adds to the Mexican folk art theme. Where the children have used blue it is a warmish blue with a tinge of red.

The hot colours of the work have been mounted on either a neutral black or on a coolish blue.  Lettering has been kept to a minimum and done in a dark blue.

The colours of the mounts round individual pictures have been picked out from the colours of the work so they add to rather than distract from the impact of the designs.  Individual work hasn’t got name labels and looks less busy than it might otherwise. This is a thorny subject in some schools where school display policy dictates that all work must be labeled.

Positioning Colourful Classroom Displays

I think you’d have to position this set of displays very carefully, ideally in the corridors or perhaps a shared area like the hall. It might be a little too distracting to have to compete for attention with all this energy!

If your appetite has been whetted and you want to see more just have a look at the  slide show below. Watch carefully and you’ll see a wide variety of ideas that you can adapt.

If you can’t view the slideshow here’s the link to the flickr set – A Mexican Marketplace

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Larger Mexican Houses with marigolds

Adapting the display ideas

These displays are mostly art based but it would be easy to tie them in with written work about Mexico, poetry, stories  creative writing topics

If Mexico isn’t going to feature in your coming year why not adapt the display ideas for the year 6  Peru unit?

There’s lots of inspiration in these displays that could easily be used for other units too.  This house display might be adapted for a unit on habitations, or even street scenes.

How else might you use these ideas? Do leave a comment and let me know.

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