colour scheme:
and all the tiny details to make the displays bright, cute, and fun.
There's even a website dedicated to bulletin board ideas! Great, right? I used to think so, and still do like some of those ideas (like keeping to colour scheme of backing paper consistent), but the more I looked at these ideas and gathered "inspiration", the more I thought, "Wait! Where are the kids in all this?" How were they involved in the creation of these displays? Did they get to make decisions on what the theme of the room was? Did they get to decide that all the walls were to be purple? or green? or pink? How are those pom pom things from the ceiling adding to their learning, other than, maybe, seeing how many chairs they'd have to stack before they could hit it with their hands (that's active learning, right?)? I bet that wasn't the intention when you spent all that time hanging them from the ceiling. Or did the kids help you hang them? Did they help you make them? Probably not.
My theory is, a classroom belongs to the children, not the teacher. Yes, it's my classroom because I teach in there, but my kids spend just as much time in there as I do, and they have to have ownership over the room. Why? Because they are the ones who are learning, not me. I believe if they walk into a ready-made classroom with a pirate theme, they will "oooh" and "aaah" for the first five minutes, and then it will all become a part of the background. White noise for the eyes. You may like it, but the kids were not involved in it's creation in any way. Would you have someone else come into your home and decorate to their liking? You would feel like a stranger in your own home. You would have no ownership over the stranger-decorated room. In fact, you may even be less likely to take proper care of the room.
I put my theory to the test in my own classroom, and allowed the children to have more input in what goes on the walls, even to the point of creating their own resources, like number lines, and alphabet flashcards. How many times does a child see "A is for apple" on a flashcard in their lifetime and say, "wow! That really helped me learn!" But I digress... Let's get back to the displays, and I will explain why I believe children should be involved in classroom displays through a journey of one of our creations.
About a month and a half ago, we were learning about the rainbow, the names of colours, and even coming up with more exciting names for colours (mauve is a new favourite). Over the course of about a week and a half, we painted in different ways, and as we talked about what we were doing, I recorded things the kids said as they worked. I took photos of the kids working as well.
Purple paint with sand mixed in made for an interesting talking point.
Driving painty cars across paper was a speedy exercise, and we even learned that red can also be called "rouge" or "scarlet."
Mixing colours to make secondary colours created lots of talk and learning opportunities. We also learned "olive" and "jade" as other words for green. We even had a discussion about our favourite veggies.
We used cotton buds to paint orange (or "peach" when we mixed in white to make it lighter).
Having really explored all the colours through colour-mixing, discussions, and different ways of painting, the children were able to come to a deeper understanding of colour and their names. I was able to photograph the children in their tasks, and record some of their conversation. Using these things, we were able to create a display of the rainbow that included their work, photos of them working, and speech bubbles of what they said when they were working:
I could have easily printed off or bought some ready-made resources and made something like this:
which, to be fair, has some great talking points and can easily be referred to when teaching (and that website does have some great ideas for art!), but would it not be far more engaging for the children to help create a display like that? Put their own work of warm and cool colours up on the wall instead of a generic ready-made print outs, and they are far more likely to remember what cool colours are!
Through the creation of our display, I was able to engage with the children and assess their learning and progress. Once everything was on the wall, the children loved going up to it and finding their photo (kids are vain, they like to see themselves in print! Use it to your advantage!). They were reminded of the activities we did, and I have even overheard them using our "new" colour words! The display is a reminder of their learning experience, and they are able to revisit it whenever they wish. Since they were involved in the creation of the display, they take more notice of it, and it is less likely to become "part of the background."
For more ideas on child-created spaces, check out:
ABC Does... - the scrapbook approach
ABC Does... - personalising the learning environment
ABC Does... - personalised teaching displays
1 comment:
Do you have a pic of what your display looked like? This was amazing...loved it.
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