Christmas angels - Peace on earth, originally uploaded by perfect_circle80.

I am about to vanish for a couple of days holiday but I couldn’t resist this one before I go. Amazing what you can do with shiny paints, sequin waste, old wrapping paper and paper doilies! These angels would brighten up any classroom and couldn’t be simpler.

There is a place in school for gorgeous classroom displays like this one, that have a real, magical, ‘Wow factor’. Displays like this don’t have much input from the children, don’t showcase work. However, they can be used as a focus for speaking and listening, just so long as staff make the effort to keep referring to them.
This display would not be hard to copy. You just need some sort of shiny background for the sky area. The figures could be traced from The Snowman big book or even scanned, printed off in grey scale, blown up to A3, then coloured in with good pencil crayons and outlined in black felt pen. This version does have hand cut letters which can be time consuming. It’s always worth laminating them when you do use them and storing them for future use. I usually pop them in a plastic pocket in my folder. Oh, and don’t forget to paper clip the letters for each word. Saves lots of sorting! I think I’d get the children involved in making the houses and the trees. You might end up with a few more, and they might not be quite so similar to the book, but I still couldn’t resist getting them involved

I think having at most one “wow” display in the classroom, or better yet in shared areas, is quite acceptable. Children can be quite entranced by them and this one graced our library for a whole winter term. When the time came to take it down the children were quite sad and if I’m honest so was I Every time I looked at it my mind supplied the first few notes of “Flying in the Air”.

When I was researching the effectiveness of different types of displays for my degree I found some interesting responses from a group of Year 5 children that slightly took me by surprise. They absolutely loved some of the “wow factor” displays and talked with great fondness of ones they remembered from previous years. Not only that, but where some of those displays had been well integrated with the work the children mixed their memories of the display with their reflections on what they had learnt. Good stuff!

So decorative classroom displays can have a greater impact on learning that you might first suppose.

Perfectcircle says:

These were done with hand prints. the heel and thumb painted red, and the fingers white. Messy, but fun!

I think they are great fun and I’m sure the kids did too. They also provide a jolly, almost instant Christmas display.

Here’s another gem from the same classroom:

These are so simple to do - everyone does one hand print in the middle, washes hands, then both hands into lovely gold paint (I think I’d be tempted to add some glitter ). Leave to dry then decorate as desired. They’d be nice hanging from a washing line too. Talking of washing lines…..

Just to finish off, from the classroom of an old friend, how about these?

Most classroom displays for Thanksgiving are too specific to be easily adapted for use in the UK classroom. This one, from the usually brilliant MrsF, is an exception. I think the disguised turkeys are great fun. There’s lots of opportunity for text rich learning and creativity.

This display could easily be used for just about any primary age group. This is in a kindergarten classroom but I can imagine it giving Year 6 a great deal of fun! Celebrity turkeys perhaps? The Simpsons as turkeys? The placard writing could be extended as well, the turkeys could write an alternative Christmas recipe book perhaps.

Of course it doesn’t have to be in the classroom. Displays like this work well in the hall and that means that several year groups can combine their work. There’s lots here for creative teachers and classes to work on and it’s a bit more original than some more obvious Christmas classroom displays.

I will be doing a number of posts on classroom displays for Christmas over the next few days.

Anti-Bullying Week (Nov 19th-23rd) classroom displays can be done very quickly and without much fuss. This one was done by Year 3 in one morning as a cross curricular activity. It combined literacy, art and PSHE with lots of emotional intelligence and project based learning along the way. (Oh, and handwriting practice) The teacher and I provided anti-bullying leaflets and literature, access to the web, and lots of support and advice.
I already had the sun and the cloud. Actually, I made them with a year 1 class as props for an assembly about 7 years ago!
Children worked with talk partners, each pair produced a tear drop with a short poem about the feeling of being bullied, an example of bullying behaviour to go on the cloud and a strategy to use if someone tries to bully you to go on the sun.
Work was added to the display as soon as it was made so it developed over the course of the morning. By 12:15 we had a fine display and a room full of contented Year 3s who were feeling very pleased with themselves. (Not to mention three tired but happy adults.)
It was a great morning’s work and the room buzzed with that happy noise that classrooms full of happy learners make.
If you are interested in displays for Anti Bullying week you may want to look at these posts too - Classroom Displays - Anti-Bullying
There are some good resources for Anti-Bullying Week on these sites: