Fruit and Veg - A taste of Spain 1, originally uploaded by LindaH.

This stunning classroom display from Mrs Littman’s Year 5 class at Kingston Primary in Benfleet, Essex won a first prize of £2000 in the Taste of Spain collage competition for UK Primary schools. I strongly suspect a Teaching Assistant might have been very busy with this display I hope she had a group helping. It’s amazing what you can do with crepe paper and it’s not nearly as time consuming as you might think.
My own favourite came from Mrs Greisens’ Year 3 class at Warren Road Primary, Orpington in Kent. This came second and won £1000 for the school. It had slightly more obvious pupil involvement I think. Some of the fruit is cut from magazines, other bits have been painted and cut out, then dried stuff has been stuck on top. I love the pictures round the edge of this one of the kids trying all the different fruit.

There was whole pack of resources to go with this competition. They looked great and would be just the thing to go with Healthy Eating week. I hope they put them online again next year as they are running the competition again in 2008. The standard of displays was not impossibly high and I hope many more schools enter classroom displays next year .

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!

Welcome Back!, originally uploaded by tuckett.

Here’s a really fun way to welcome a class back after a holiday. Every item in the cabinet relates to something they are going to learn in the following term. There are riddles to solve too:

Tucket says:

I used this idea last year because my own son was so into the I Spy books. I try to use some “easy finds” and some challenges in each clue. Easy to switch around, change, update, and connect to current unit throughout the year. Could easily be adapted to a table top box style display if no showcase is available! Children may begin to write their own science riddles as well! Good Luck. Have fun.

So, just for fun, if you’ve a bit of time to spare and an interest in science why not see how many things you can spot? Can you solve the riddles? Answers on the photo in Flickr or below please.

Le Temps, originally uploaded by LindaH.

This display was used daily, right from the start of term with a Year 5 class. A five to ten minute discussion, in French, right after registration. This Year 5 class had some experience of French in Year 4 and were ready to start to move on. A rota was set up so that each day a different child was responsible for the weather forecast session. The child took charge, with TA support, and the class answered set questions to provide the forecast in French.
The activity worked on days of the week, weather volcabulary and simple question and answer sentence structure. It took what could have been a boring drill activity to a higher level. It was particularly powerful because of the high level of interaction and because the children liked standing by the board, pretending to be The Weather Person on TV!

The weather symbols were taken from the BBC web site, printed out, and laminated. They were used in conjunction with the sentences as visual/kinesthetic aids to introduce the volcabulary. The whole display could be easily taken down and stored for further use.

Land Use, originally uploaded by LindaH.

Every year we used to invite the planning officer in to explain to Year 5 what was going to be done with the an old swimming baths site. The baths were a 30s listed building but in a bad way.
The children always asked really searching questions and never let him off lightly.
I think children really enjoy working on something real and concrete like this and it shows in the standard of work they produce.

The site has now been re-developed but sadly it didn’t incorporate any of the children’s ideas. A skating rink was usually one of the suggestions, along with play areas and wildlife gardens. What we got instead was a number of large shops, fast food outlets, car parking and some high rise flats.