Showing posts with label bulletin boards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bulletin boards. Show all posts

Monday, 4 May 2009

Bulletin Boards: The Skills Tree


A simple yet effective bulletin board is "The Skills Tree". I was lucky enough to inherit this from Ms. Morrison, my classroom predecessor. On each branch were the skills crucial to our study (in this case, Active Citizenship). At the end of a lesson each student takes a post-it note and writes down the skill they used most during the lesson and why. As they leave students stick the post-it note to the corresponding branch.

Voila! A neat reflective plenary and quick feedback for you as the teacher to see which skills were developed. Alternatively, if you're feeling flexible with your planning, ask students at the beginning of lessons to pick the skill they are least confident and put their post-it note on the relevant branch. You can then brainstorm skill development with students and practice during the lesson.

This can easily be extended to other subjects -- perhaps grammatical rules; with history consider comparative or essay skills; in science think about identification, description, explanation and evaluation. Any other ideas?

Monday, 20 April 2009

Bulletin Boards; Display your long-term plans

I'm a stickler for knowing what is coming next. I need a great big list that I can tick off as I go. Some students are exactly the same. They arrive at the door inquiring "What are we doing today?" or "When do we finish this topic?" Adding to the limitless distractions of a class trying to settle as you wipe away the remains of last lesson and aattempt uploading the new lesson's powerpoint. SO -- while you're feeling energetic after the holidays -- consider updating your classroom noticeboards to include your long-term plans.

All I did was give the name of the topic we studied each half-term and put it into a grid so students could easily see what their year held. Pupils like being able to see is next and also enjoy seeing what other students are learning about. Looking at the wall, they would reminisce about topics from previous years and look forward excitedly to future topics.

As you might notice, I didn't actually have a noticeboard on the wall so I stapled up some material bought at a market instead. This had the added advantage of being unrippable and my pupils (generally) refrained from writing on it too. At the end of the year you can wash the material then stick it back up re-refreshed in September.