Decorating hints

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2001 : June : 24

Decorating hints
By Kimberly

Maria,
Congratulations! I graduated in December and have just signed a contract to teach 5th grade in a local private. I have some ideas for you and please feel free to e-mail me with tips that you find as well.

Bulletin
boards look nice when covered in fabric instead of paper for a background. During my student teaching last fall my mentor used fabric that coordinated with her theme to accent student work, current events and regular information boards. I was very impressed at how much more style this added vs. the plain solid color paper.
While teaching with her, I created a student work board

to highlight good work. This looks very impressive when parent conference time rolls around! My title was "Take a look at this" I found a notepad that had a frog with a magnafying glass on it. I used a font style from my clipart program to create the student names in a way that made them stretched in the middle (magnified) and printed them out on blue paper. Then I attatched the names to the magnifying glasses and laminated them before putting them on the board. I added a frog bulletin board set found at a local teacher's supply store and viola! Cute but still grown up enough for 5th graders!

About the picture books-- some picture books have more grown-up themes to them such as "Pink and Say" these would be fine in your library, others may need to be set aside and used for special literature projects.

Management is tough, isn't it? it's not something that they cover very well in college. I got an idea from a fellow student that I really like and will be using this year. She created a huge set of lips and a no symbol(circle with a slash through it, but with open areas cut out so that you can see objects under it). These were cut from separate pieces of paper(RED and BLACK) and laminated separately. When she wanted students to not talk she would place the no sign over the lips. Whispering was 1/2 covered lips and cooperative group time or free time for quiet-normal conversations had uncovered lips. Her 5th grade student teaching experience went rather smoothly in part because of these lips.

I have lots of ideas and will have more I'm sure as I set up my room this summer(I can get into my room everyday this summer if I want to!)and would be glad to correspond with you via e-mail and snail mail. It's nice to have someone to rejoice and commiserate with in the first year of teaching!

Best of Luck!
Kimberly