Our word wall, originally uploaded by Glazgow.

Several people have asked for phonics classroom displays. I’m not surprised as they are hard to do well. One approach, that produces a really interactive display, is to go for a word wall.
Glazgow did this one with a Primary 3 (7 year olds) class in Scotland. He says

Our word wall (window actually). Has all the phonemes, the alphabet, common words (tricky words) and punctuation. It also has 6 lines which can be used to make sentences when working with the children.

This is a great working display that can be brought out year after year. It can be used by individuals, groups or for whole class teaching. All that needs to be done is to laminate everything and use lots of sticky putty.
It’s important that it is placed at child height so that it can be used easily.
I’m in two minds about using window space this way. There are good arguments both for and against. What do you think?

aaar!, originally uploaded by Sunflower Lily.

Pirates are a great theme for classroom displays and this ship is a particularly lively one. Lots of super vocabulary words and phrases, dastardly pirates and a rather good sea really make this an excellent learning and reference resource.
I think this may be a Year 2 class, as they are working on speech bubbles. Year 3 and 4 are also ideal for pirate topics. It fits very well with the literacy target of writing a story in chapters and working with the adventure story genre. It’s much more fun though if you can bring in some cross curricular elements.
Some of these ideas have been adapted from the Belair display books, which are a great source of inspiration. You’ll find a range of them in the book store

Captain Capacity

Pirate Role Play Area

See Also:

Pirate Pop-Ups - moving toys in Year 3

Originally posted by supersonic_ibu

Year 5 Design & Technology

This year 5 class worked on another aspect of Greek art for a Design & Technology project:

Using RM Colour Magic the Y5 children designed a picture to go with their myths they had written and we printed them onto t-shirts as part of ‘Talking Textiles.’

I expect they were really proud and excited to have t-shirts they had designed themselves! This display is a very authentic celebration of their hard work and an interesting way of combining Literacy, History and DT, not to mention integrating ICT! A real cross curricular project.

More Displays about Ancient Greece

Lots of people seem to be looking for displays about Ancient Greece at the moment so this is the second of a number that I will be highlighting over the next week or so.

Story Starters, originally uploaded by Glazgow.

You can’t have too many ideas for story starter classroom displays. Here’s another gem and this time the phrases have come from the class:

The children did a “Walkabout, Talkabout” and came up with all the ideas for Where, When, Who and What could happen in a story.

They now use the display to help them chose characters, setting etc for their story writing.

I like the use of colour in this display. The colours actually add meaning helping the children to classify the phrases. It’s also not too busy.

Using the class to generate the scenarios and phrases is much more powerful than just providing them.They will feel more ownership of the display if they know it is based on their ideas. It is just vitally important that the staff resist the temptation to just pop up the same words next year, as they’ve got them already laminated This sort of recycling happens too often and when it does engaging classroom displays lose much of their impact.

IMG_1791, originally uploaded by LMH_.

This is a good example of a classroom display that was really interactive. The word wall was used by children in a multi-age Speech and Language Unit to help them with their story writing.
It’s really important for this kind of display that it was placed at a child friendly height and that children had free access to it in independent time as well as during the literacy hour. They could use it to tell oral stories to talk partners first before they did any writing.
The folders you can see at the bottom of the display contained cards more with words or pictures. The children could then use those to help them structure their story.
They could choose a ‘Who’ card from the wall, perhaps a spaceman. Write one sentence or more, depending on the age and ability of the child, about the spaceman. Then go to the ‘Where’ folder and choose a setting and so on.
Those less able might just sequence the cards whilst the more able used them to tell quite complex stories.

It’s a good technique in the mainstream classroom too and an interesting way to use a classroom display area.