Bulletin board, originally uploaded by hale_popoki.

Tina in the USA posted this and she hits on one of the major themes to come up in my research. The issue of time. Classroom displays can eat up time and teachers (and TAs) have to find creative solutions to this.
Click on the image to see her notes and links to close-ups.

This is one of my classroom bulletin boards……I try to change student work on this at least once a month (twice a month would be ideal, but the reality is there isn’t enough prep time to do that usually. Still have the other classroom bulletin boards and the school ones to keep up!)

Gone are the student teaching days when I spent an incredible amount of time planning and putting up a bulletin board…..now my rule is, it’s gotta’ take me 30 minutes or less.
This one was quick because I didn’t die-cut any letters for the heading.

This board is great for accountablity…..I post work as students finish, and it’s pretty obvious by the remaining empty spaces who still needs to finish work! =)

hairymaclary.JPG, originally uploaded by LMH_.

Here’s Year 1’s take on Hairy Mclary, that wonderful creature from Donaldson’s Dairy, not to mention his friends Bottomly Potts and the rest.

I think giving the children a restricted pallette and careful mounting has produced a unfied classroom display.

Putting the picutes on a washing-line allows for more to be displayed but I wonder how well the children can see their work at that height.

Hetty’s friends, originally uploaded by LMH_.

Posted here with permission these are some wonderful classroom displays, originals by jaydee67 of the TA forum

We did a project a couple of years ago when ‘Hetty Hen’ came to visit the school. Hetty is a toy hen who had a rucksack, sleeping bag, chicken food and a letter of introduction. The story was she had been travelling the world and had come to our school to stay for a while. Each child got the chance to take her home for a night and take a photo or 2 with a disposable camera, they then wrote their ‘Hetty Adventures’. I posted a similar request to this one on a couple of boards I am a member of and Hetty started to get postcards from all over the world. Places she had supposedly visited. Some people even sent the souvenirs they had been ‘looking after’ for her until she got to our school. One person even posted her ‘friend’ a toy horse who wanted to see Shetland, others ent a series of cards over a few weeks. There are some very kind people out there.We had a display of the world map and all the cards and letters - the postie was almost mugged daily for a while by children hoping for the next card. Good fun.

(jaydee67)

student art 2, originally uploaded by xJuliex.

I really like this collection of art work froma middle school in the USA. The work itself is very high quality but also it has been thoughtfully displayed. I like the use of a single background rather than individual work being mounted. I’m not totally sure about the border. It does pick up on the colours used in the paintings but it might be just a little bit busy.

3D tree of life for teaching kids about evolution, originally uploaded by cpurrin1.

“If you want to show young children how their favorite animals (e.g., cats, dogs, horses) share a common ancestor, ask them to bring in plastic animals from different species (e.g., house cat, lion, tiger), and attach them to different branches of a “tree of life”. Precede this lesson plan with a trip to the library, so that you know which species they need to collect at home (the safari phase), and which species they might need to just draw (or make out of clay).”
C Purrin
The designer of this display is a associate professor of Evolutionary Biologywho lives and works in the US where teaching evolution is a bit more of a hot potato than in the UK. Hr’s posted ideas about teaching evolution in school extensively on Flickr and talks about it on his web pages too.
“The majority of Americans don’t accept a natural origin of life, a nonhuman ancestry for humans, or that species continue to evolve today through non-magical processes such as natural selection. This faith in supernatural explanations is maintained by indoctrination of young children by parents, but facilitated by weak biology instruction at public schools, where evolution is rarely portrayed as the unifying principle in biology. To effectively educate children about life, therefore, science standards must be readjusted so that exposure to evolution is commenced in kindergarten, when it might better counteract the fictional creation mythologies that kids are being taught at home. Waiting until middle school or high school to teach evolution is, as polls show, “not so effective.”