Wild about Reading Bulletin Board



Window or bulletin board display for elementary school.



Wild About Reading and Math Display

• Green party plates, small, two packs                
• Monkey party plates, one pack                        
• Green upper case lettering, one pack                
• Red lower case lettering, one pack                  
• Clear double sided tape and/or clear scotch tape

This is an economical and quick display to assemble!

 

 For the letter tiles, my coworker and I used pieces of scotch tape that we rolled into small cylinders to place the lettering onto the party plates. The plates were placed on the inside of the window with clear double sided tape.

Multi Month Spring Bulletin Board



Multi Month Spring Bulletin Board
 

After searching for a spring bulletin board that would last from March to May, I decided to combine two different ideas, bees and a word garden, to create my own spring bulletin board. The monthly ideas for taking the bulletin board from March to May are listed below. Add your decorations to the open areas and you will have your own multi month bulletin board.

·         March - green shamrocks

·         April - Easter eggs and/or daffodils

·         May -  Larger word flowers with larger leaves

 

Materials for Basic Bulletin Board

•  brown and blue paper for the background - I used three extra large sheets of construction paper in each color.
• 3" AccuCut flower die
• Construction paper in desired colors for flowers.
• Fine point black marker
• 6 craft sticks
• bulletin board trim in desired pattern
• tape
• stapler
• scissors, adult size
• Precut black letters or use AccuCut dies and construction paper

Bulletin Board Title

Our Un"bee"lievable Word Garden was made using purchased, precut black letters and AccuCut yellow construction paper for the "bee" letters. I did not use a pattern for the wings or bees. I drew the wing shape onto black construction paper with a pencil and then cut them out with scissors. I made the bumble bees by folding a square of yellow paper in half and cutting out a small circle, then a larger oval. The bumble bee stripes, letter stripes, and bee faces were drawn with a fine point black marker.The antennae are drawn on after placing the bumble bees and letters on the bulletin board.

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 Word Garden Signs

The signs are constructed of orange squares and slightly smaller yellow squares that matched the border. I made tape rolls and taped the yellow squares to the orange squares. Then I lettered the signs, Creeping Phonograms, Blooming Affixes, and Math Patch. I used a stapler to staple the craft sticks onto the finished signs and then onto the bulletin board.

Flower Construction

I used an AccuCut die for most of the flowers.  I did not use a pattern for the leaves, instead I took a standard size sheet of colored copy paper and folded it in half twice. Using scissors, I cut out a leaf shape. The quarter folded sheet of paper yielded 4 leaves and I made three leaf shapes.

The Math Patch thin, yellow flower petals were cut out around the math words that I printed onto yellow paper first.

Various types of flowers with math vocabulary and the prefixes mono, bi, tri, and quad. 
 
 
The phonograms were chosen from The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists 
 

 

Double Duty Snowmen Bulletin Boards

I browse my way through catalogs, magazines, EBay, Pinterest, and other websites on a daily basis. Flipping through pages of all sorts, scanning pictures, and reading combine in a curious way inside the storage files of my mind.  My creative brain sifts through information from unrelated sources and combines these bits and pieces into a new idea. For example, making flowers from coffee filters and making a cupcake bouquet somehow gave birth to the idea of using flattened cupcake liners to edge a bulletin board. Before that, the picture of letter tile paper plates and wrapping Christmas presents inspired me to use wrapping paper for quilt block squares on a bulletin board. Below are pictures of the two bulletin boards that I assembled for a hallway bulletin board that is close to the elementary office. I hope that these two ideas will help and inspire you to new creative heights of your own.

December to January Snow Secret Bulletin Board

It's Snow Secret We're A Great School!

Supplies

• two rolls of gift wrap from a dollar store
• 3 dinner size party plates
• 2 dessert size party plates
• 2 or 3 sheets of black and green construction paper
• orange marker for snowman nose
• black marker for snowman buttons, eyes, mouth, and "stitching" around squares
• scissors
• stapler
• scotch tape
• computer and printer

I typed the headline on my computer, printed it, and trimmed each page to the size I wanted. If your computer or printer has a banner setting that would make this job less time consuming.
The font is called LD SNOW
Font size needs to be set at a minimum of 200.

Verna M. Kelly Snowflake Quote
Snowflakes are on of nature's most fragile things, but just look what they do when they stick together

I wasn't happy with the size of the quote that you see in the picture, so I reset the font size on my document and redid it.

Snowmen were created by turning party plates upside down and drawing buttons, face, and nose with markers.
I didn't use a pattern for the scarfs, arms, or hats. The hats are cut from a 8.5x11.5 inch sheet of construction paper. I free handed the bowler and top hat with a pencil. The hatbands are held in place with rolled tubes of scotch tape. I fringed the ends of the scarf by snipping the end with scissors.

Assembly

• White paper covered the bulletin board. I cut snowflake gift wrap into fourteen, 12" "quilt"squares and the snowman gift wrap into 2" strips for the boarder. Using the printed grid on the reverse side of the gift wrap made this an easy job.
• Start at the bottom left of the board and place your first row across the bottom of the bulletin board.
• Use your bottom row for a guide to place the second and third row. I placed all the full squares first, then placed the squares that had to be trimmed to fit.
• I stapled the snowmen heads and bodies first, then slid the "twig" arms under the plate rims and stapled them into place. Hats and scarfs are also stapled into place.
• Staple headline and quote into place.
• Using a black marker, draw 'x' stitches around each quilt square. You don't have to, but it does make for a much nicer bulletin board.
• Last, staple border into place.

February to March Kindness Bulletin Board

Supplies

2 packages of 40 cupcake liners, red with white hearts

About 6 sheets of red construction paper.

2 sheets of white copy paper

 

Assembly

1. Remove the snowman border from the bulletin board and throw away. Carefully remove the snowman hats and save for reuse.
   
   
2. I found a black line master of a heart that read, "Kindness in Contagious".  I enlarged the pattern 120%  so the hearts are about 3.5" and made fourteen hearts. Next I cut them out.
3. Using the green bowler hat for a pattern, place it on a sheet of white paper and trace around it. Cut out the white hat. Make a red hat band with a narrow strip of red construction paper. Use tubes of rolled scotch tape to place it on the white hat. Use a black marker and draw small X's along the edge of the hat for contrast "stitches" Replace the green hatband on the black stove top hat with red paper also.
4. On a computer,  set up a word document using landscape, narrow margins, my font is LD Dots 200 font or use a size that will fit the word kindness on a single sheet of paper. Type your headline,  Kindness is at the heart of (Name of School). Then trim your sheets of paper into strips.
5. Fold a sheet of red construction paper in half and cut a heart shape starting at the fold line. You will need three of these large hearts. Cut 5 or six small red hearts and  six white hearts. Using  bulletin board pictures as a guide, place your hearts as shown. Draw small black X's for stitching around the hearts that decorate the snowman hats and the heart each snowman is holding.
6. 
   Staple hats onto snowmen. Staple a heart onto one hand of each snowman.  
7. Use flattened cupcake liners for your border. I placed a heart arrangement in the center of the bottom border. If you don't want to do this, purchase 3 packages of cupcake liners.