I have learned a lot about displays from the teaching blogs this year, yet I feel it's an area that I haven't quite mastered yet (all in good time, I suppose!). Here are a few parts of my classroom that I'm quite happy with:
1. SESE and Maths focus areas.
This SESE one has our polystyrene models of the layers of the earth (hanging from the ceiling), a map of Ireland with counties listed by provence (thanks to Seomra Ranga), the continents of the world (blue heading and black-backed map) with the children's factfiles of the continents underneath and maps of Europe, the world and the solar system.
Our maths corner has a pack of cards (to help with probability questions in Mental Maths), metric units and conversions, fraction wall, percentage wall, shapes posters, rugby players profiles (free with The Irish Times - contain height, weight, age, etc. - loads of scope for maths activities!) and home-made posters for area with pictures of the children holding/standing beside our examples of 1m squared and 100cm squared).
2. Giant history timeline. This timeline is about 8 or 9 A2 pages long. It took a bit of time to put together but I'm very happy with how it turned out. Rather than cluttering it with lots of individual events, I've just labelled it with the major time periods between 5000BC and the present. You can download the labels I made by clicking here, finding a load of black and coloured paper and spending a lot of time cutting and gluing!
3. "We Are Authors" box. I use this box to hold class books. If we do work on A4 sheets during class, I simply gather them together and bind them with a clear sheet in front, coloured card behind and a plastic slide binder (very cheap to buy!). Examples of books we have made are a Martin Luther King class book, a travel brochure as Gaeilge, letters from Antarctica (pretending that they were Tom Crean) etc. I also bind any artwork that has been done on A4 sheets. If there is something like a collection of water safety posters, I ask a child to design a cover sheet (title, picture, explanation) on the computer. If you want the "We are Authors" sign, click here.
4. Gaeilge: Prionta sa timpeallacht. I have displayed foclóir a bhaineann leis an t-am ar luaschártaí and stuck them on the wall around the clock. Click here to download these. They're laid out so that you can put four different coloured sheets into your printer and they'll work out correctly!
I also made a massive (2 A2 pages) airgead chart. It's very visual and the children refer to it ó am go h-am. Click here to download these.
Hi Emer,
ReplyDeleteLove this post. I, like you, am an NQT and feel I have yet to master the art of classroom displays. I love the ideas you have here and they have given me some inspiration for re-using some of the items I already have in my classroom (so as to minimise expense & maximise their effectiveness). I particularly like your 'We are authors' idea. We made 'Our Yummy Recipe Book' where the children created recipes and stuck them on coloured card which we then put together to form a recipe book. We have this on display in the room and they love to flick through it when they are finished their work. Using your idea I am going to make booklets of other writing projects and bind them for them to browse through.
Thanks for the inspiration :)
Ruth
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