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:

Children’s Rights, originally uploaded by LindaH.

Alice is blogging about Human Rights Day which is on December 10th. The focus for the last 3 years has been on education :

.. focus on primary and secondary education, through integrating human rights issues into curricula, changing educational processes and teaching methods and, most importantly, improving the environment in which education takes place.

OHCHR
In my last school we tried to help the children think beyond their own situation and to consider children’s needs, rights and responsibilities.

It was done as a whole school initiative, integrated into PSHE, circle time and some of the geography units. This display was from Year 3 and might not be as ‘perfect’ as some. It’s backed on sugar paper, which fades and doesn’t last, it has no border and the spacing is quite random. To me it looks a bit scrappy but, and it’s an important but, this was very much the children’s display. They were deeply touched and quite shocked by some of the things we covered. This was their response and in some ways that makes it much more powerful than a ‘perfect’ display.

BFG, originally uploaded by LindaH.

Multi-purpose classroom displays are often the most useful. Year 5 studied the BFG and made their own dream catchers. The glass jar contain children’s bad dreams. Each child filled a jar with things to represent their worst nightmares. The jars are named and have a list of ingredients on the front.
This was a really powerful way of getting them to connect with the book. Everyone tried to have the most awful things in their jar and in the course of doing this there were lots of great opportunities for talking and listening, and for creative problem solving.
The children had to work out how to represent their worst fears in a concrete form that could go inside a jar. Strong stuff, as children tried to work out what to use for war, poverty, famine and death. Of course there were a fair number of spiders and other more nameless monsters too
This work showed a lovely integration of literacy with emotional literacy. It stayed fresh and interesting for a long time too as children read the contents of each jar and discussed issues that would not have been easily raised any other way. Classroom displays that continue being a talking point for weeks like this are worth their weight in gold!

Here’s a good idea for a classroom display that promotes ownership and involvement. Sally says:

Each week someone is the Special Person. They get to embellish the board with whatever they want, do extra jobs for me and have their picture taken to be added to the hall of fame photoalbum I’ve made!…… another thing the special person gets to do…select the joke of the day from my joke book. The jokes are so cheesy it is unbelievable but they find them hilarious!

I’ve worked in lots of classes where variations of this idea have been used but I like the way this one has been linked to the information about what’s happening this week. It draws the rest of the class in more. It made me wonder if there could be room for ‘ what we are learning this week’ on the board as well? If that could be documented, say with a few quick pictures and captions as the week went on, then the photo album could become a record of the year’s work too. What do you think?

DSCF1475.JPG, originally uploaded by Cefn Fforest Primary Photoblog.

From Cefn Fforest Primary comes a nice idea you might want to include in next year’s planning. Hands Around the World is a web exchange with a difference. One of the drawbacks of things like this is that children can put large amounts of effort into their thing to send off and then time pressures or postal problems mean that the other schools don’t always respond.
However this one is different. Instead the hand templates are filled in and all sent to a central clearing house. You then get back a packet with a selection of hands from all over the world.
I agree it doesn’t have the impact of something like Postcards from Virtual Friends but it’s still a lovely thing to do.

You need to register if you are going to do it though as the timing is quite tight.