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

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

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.

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!

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?

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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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.

Boscastle, originally uploaded by vikellis.

I think this is an excellent example of an information rich display. It’s not arranged at all the way I would normally recommend for informative displays but it has great impact. It breaks all sorts of design guidelines but it does so in an interesting way. It’s worth remembering that the guidelines aren’t rigid rules and sometimes willfully breaking them can make a better and more exciting design.
Although it is visually rather busy I find myself wanting to pour over it and to read all the posters. Surely that’s exactly the reaction we want for an informative display?
The second display I want to show you uses a more conventional design, with one major design element in a strategic position on the board (the globe) and work arranged less randomly.

I think this one works really well too and I suppose what they have in common, apart from the topic, is the use of pupils’ work is prominent in both displays. Good stuff!
I’ve blogged these as part of Blog Action Day 09 #BAD09

Guidelines for Designing and Planning Displays

I’ve written about design and how important it is when planning your classroom displays in my regular column for Learning Support Magazine

I thought this might be a good time of year to draw it all together and just remind regular readers here of some basic guidelines.

I’ve gathered some of it up into a free Classroom Displays Design pdf that I hope you’ll find useful.

Let me know if you find this sort of post useful in planning your classroom displays

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What will your display boards look like to the children coming into your classroom at the start of the new term? How will you make them feel welcome?

This display for a kindergarten is used year after year but the children’s names are always added using a different technique. Classroom Displays flickr group member Laurel (puddle jump) says:

By the time all the kids’ names are displayed there’s usually only a bit of rainbow peeking out. The name art differs each year (rainbow traced names, yarn shaped, mosaic names, wax-resist water colour over crayon, etc.) but the rainbow remains.

That and the quote below got me wondering. Are there really 2 diverse approaches to getting classrooms ready for the new year or do most of us find a middle way?

Get a Few Wow Classroom Displays Up, Quick!

Some teachers like to get displays up, maybe even before the end of the previous term. Often these are recycled displays, some of which they’ve used repeatedly over the years. One Year 6 pupil once remarked on entering a Year 2 class that she had fond memories of making the beach hut on their Then and Now seaside  display. Empty boards make some teachers feel uncomfortable and worried.

Let’s Start Our Classroom Displays With a Blank Canvas

Others prefer empty boards with just fresh backing paper on them. One of my teachers always used to just put up mysterious eye catching titles and leave them guessing as to what might go there. I liked this idea and so did the pupils. Sometimes we even changed our display plans in response to their suggestions of what the mystery display might be. It made room for the pupils and gave them more of a sense of ownership of the classroom.

Who’s Classroom Is It Anyway?

Of course that’s another question of approach, is it your classroom or theirs?  Here’s an interesting take on it that I came across via Twitter (Follow me on Twitter I’m @lindiop.Thanks @teachingideas).

The Big Fresh from Choice Literacy July 25, 2009 Theres Room for Me Here
There’s Room for Me Here

What’s the hardest thing for a teacher to do when setting up the room before students arrive? It may be leaving most of the walls and bulletin boards bare. We pride ourselves in planning schedules and lessons that maximize time, build community, and help students thrive from the moment they step into the classroom. And that begins with a classroom that is well-organized, clean. . .and beautifully decorated.

Yet those bare walls send a message more powerful than the most lovely displays. As Debbie Miller writes in Teaching with Intention:

When kids walk into classrooms on the first day of school, we want them to feel, “Oh good! There’s room for me here!” When everything is already done, kids don’t have to wonder much about who is in charge. They know that from the minute they walk into the room.

That’s why on the first days of school the classroom walls, bulletin boards and doors will be almost bare. That’s as it should be! Don’t jump in and “put stuff up” just to make yourself feel better. Be patient. In a few days, your students’ classroom portraits could be smiling back at you, or beginning of the year interviews posted for all to see. . .

How do you approach the new term when planning your classroom displays?

What do you think?
Updated
I’ve closed the poll now and 150 of you said:

Classroom Displays of Project Work

Following on from the Renoir Umbrellas and as a further part of the Take One Picture 2009 project comes this excellent classroom displays idea from Caroline Lennox. Caroline is a member of the Classroom Displays Flickr group and she also has a very fine blog (Learning Parade)

In her blog post Rainy Day Reads Caroline explains more about the process of designing and making the display.

The class first explored lots of illustrated children’s books about rain from the library.

The puddles were painted based on photographs the children took in the play ground.

The wellies were made by drawing round someone wearing a pair!

I love the idea of getting the children to draw round their wellies! Isn’t it great? I’ve never done that although we’ve all drawn round children’s hands and feet or even used them to print. I think drawing round the wellies is quite inspired.
It really reminds me of a children’s book illustration but I can’t think of the name of the book. (Meh! Having one of those moments when I can picture the book cover perfectly but can’t read the title!)

It was an American book about a child posting a birthday invitation on a rainy day. Anyone know which one I mean?

Favourite Rainy Day Classroom Displays

We get plenty of rain in the UK and weather is a good focus for all sorts of classroom displays. I’d love to gather up some more display ideas on this topic.

What’s your favourite way of making a classroom display about rain?

Update :  Splish, Splosh, Sploosh

Sunflower Lily, one of our members, was inspired to have a go at this one. I think she’s done a lovely job, don’t you?

The author is S.B Linton who runs Autism Classroom.com and she’s provided us with some great tips. If you’ve questions please let us know in the comments and we’ll try to help. (If you use twitter be sure to follow her on there AutismClassroom twitter as she posts lots of useful links)

The numbers of students with autism in our schools is increasing, as is the need for classrooms that effectively educate children with autism.

The following information from the book How to Set Up a Classroom for Students with Autism: A Manual for Teachers, Para-professionals and Administrators by S. B. Linton, highlights some tips in setting up an autism friendly classroom.

Use Various Types of Visual Schedules

• Daily class schedules to accurately tell what activities will occur that particular school day. This type of schedule should be posted, easy for students to follow and should be large enough to see from across the room.
• Individual/personal schedules to help students organize, learn routines and possibly relieve stress for some students with autism by giving them an idea of what to expect. A personal schedule might also show sensory input activities which are specific to that student, individual speech therapy times, break times, small group areas, or toileting opportunities, which may not be the same exact time as other students.
• Task schedules to serve as directions. They help to visually “break down” the elements of a task or an activity for a student. Task schedules show a student what will occur within the context of a structured lesson or activity, much like directions. Task schedules can also help students perform tasks without the use of a verbal prompt from the adult, thus increasing independence.
• Visual Reinforcement schedules to give students a visual indicator of when their reinforcement or break will occur. These may be helpful for a child who is on a behavior intervention plan and needs to be reminded that their reinforcement will be coming soon.

Organize the Room to Support the Student

• Create clear visual boundaries in the classroom.
• Make various centers and locations for the students to move to throughout the day to avoid having them sit in one spot all day.

• Create work areas near blank walls or facing way from peers to improve concentration.
• Remove distracting items such as string, bright colors, loud appliances.
• Create a safe place or quiet area in the room for the student if they need a retreat.
• Remember you will have to teach play skills and social skills. They do not come naturally for some students with autism.
• Seat “runners” with their back facing a wall or divider and have the adult facing the student, between the student and the door.

Be An Effective Collaborator

• Creating a specific time for staff to meet, answer questions or create new plans is a critical.
• View student’s objectives as a shared responsibility of the student’s team.
• Keep a notebook or journal that is sent from school to home each day.

Use Language Based Techniques

• Try a set of pictures showing the steps in washing their hands or a visual task analysis for hanging up their belongings in the morning to help keep some students focused.
• Write down directions instead of ju st using words.
• Use hands on activities as much as possible.
• Use a visual topic board to show the students what the lesson will be about.

Question. Discuss. Learn.
www.autismclassroom.com