Changing what is on the walls

Last term I read a blog by Bruce Hammonds called New School Year - what has been achieved? and it started me wondering about how Bruce would view my classroom.  As a result I posted this blog The Classroom Environment - what makes a class attractive?  I posted it on a Friday night, shared it on Twitter, and four hours of teachers sharing photos of what is on the walls of their classrooms currently and in the past began.  It was awesome!!  And Bruce put a link in his next blog post to my blog post!  Bonus!!

There is no disputing that a classroom environment physically needs to be warm and comfortable for students to learn.  I have found over a number of years that the classroom should reflect the learning journey of the children within it.  It should stimulate the children to learn.  It should set the standard for the expected outcome of learning.

In the last few weeks I have read three different versions of an article about a study looking at classroom displays and how they affect student achievement.  This article, Heavily Decorated Classrooms Disrupt Attention and Learning in Young Children, According to New Carnegie Mellon Research, was one version of the articles.  I have had the opportunity to engage in discussion and debate on this in three separate forums, one on Twitter through a UK education twerp, and two different teacher groups on Facebook.  This is a topic with a lot of diverse opinions and experiences.

Displaying Student Work  on the Responsive Classroom  website says:   "A classroom filled with the work of children is a delight to be in and sends a message to students that their work and their learning are important."  This post even advocates students create the displays themselves!  And then there is this little pearl of wisdom from a post called Tips for New Teachers: Classroom Displays from the ASCD website: "These days, when I'm visiting many classrooms as an elementary school consultant and coach, I'm more convinced than ever that classroom displays should consist mostly of work students have done themselves."

In New Zealand we place a lot of importance on the classroom reflecting what our students are learning, the classroom space supporting learning and that that space reflects the student's own works.  It is also expected that the work displayed will change regularly to reflect the continual learning opportunities that come along.  I personally believe that you take something down when you have something to put up.  Occasionally I rearrange so that I can still keep up work that I consider needs to stay.

Consequently, this term, a lot has changed in my class on the walls compared to the visual tour I took my readers on in the post mentioned in the first paragraph.

Firstly, my topic wall changed.  Instead of the Tiriti o Waitangi, we started the term with Anzac Day.  This was a mini unit, so this is not the full range of things I could have displayed.  The newspaper articles were brought in by a student.  I go into more about how this display engaged students in my blog post Creating excitement about learning for Anzac Day.

Last term my students and I, for Poem of the Week, read a poem about what was in Grandma's cupboard.  And we created a piece of art about it, which was put up on the wall late in the first term. 

I may have mentioned in the post I wrote last term (link in the first paragraph) that my school had a centennial celebration last term.  Schools tend to create books to celebrate those sorts of things, and we wrote poems about the school to go in the book.  I put these up last term by rearranging the writing we had done about Brendon McCullum and the fish display.  I'm not ready to take this writing down yet, so I squished it up a bit.

To fit my new displays I also moved the fish display this term, because underneath the centennial poems I put our new display about Keeping Ourselves Safe, because we're also working through that this term.  The display is pretty much the children's thinking on the various aspects of the topic as we have gone through it.  (Please excuse the missing e's - I ran out and haven't got to the resource centre as of yet to purchase more).

This was another activity that came from Poem of the Week with a poem called How does the sun rise?  As you can see we painted our own sunrises using water colour paints and we wrote poems and descriptions of the sun rising.

The following week our Poem of the Week was called Autumn Leaves.  So we went out and played in the leaves and wrote some poems and descriptions of autumn leaves.  I also asked the children to collect leaves and do some drawings of them with detail and colour them in and cut them out to add to the display.

To add the writing about sunrises and autumn leaves I had to move our display on the fish, and remove our other writing inspired by calendar pictures.

On Friday it was a lovely sunny day, so I decided art should be done outside.  Bruce talks about close observational sketching of nature in his blog I've linked in the first paragraph, so I thought we really needed this on our walls too.  So out we went for 30 minutes with an A5 piece of cartridge each and after a wee chat the class concentrated their hearts out for that whole 30 minutes (except for the ones distracted by the kitten from the school house that wanted to play), and they came up with their own drawings of a part of a tree they choose to focus on.  Some of the students also really had a go at shading and smudging their pencil to create greater effect.  So proud of them.

To put up the kids drawings I had to squeeze up our similes display a bit.  I also squeezed our similes display down a bit so I could staple up the collection of metaphors some children had researched.  As you can see there is still some wall space above my metaphors.... that's where I need a person with a head for heights to put up something that will stay for a long time...

 

 

I still kept my fish from earlier in the year... I just keep moving them to fit with what I am putting up on my wall.

 And this is what my back wall of my class looks like.

There are more changes currently happening.  My topic wall has changed to being about New Zealand native birds, and new stories about rain and accompanying pictures have replaced the flags on the wires.  My class are also currently working on posters about the birds.  Watch the next post on my classroom environment to see my new exciting news....

The Classroom Environment - what makes a class attractive?

After school today I thought I'd take a quick look at my blogs.  First though I took a glance through my blog roll and a post by Bruce Hammond caught my eye: New School Year - what has been achieved?  So I had a bit of a read. 

 

Bruce apparently had visited some schools towards the end of Week 6 and he said he was somewhat disappointed at the classroom displays.  This is what he said he had wanted to see:

 

I would've liked to have seen:

Evidence of a simple environmental study - based on students’ questions, valuing their ‘prior ideas’ including some observational drawings, language work and creative art. To ensure quality teachers need to teach simple presentation techniques/’scaffolds’.

I would've liked to have seen the above work well displayed with appropriate captions.

I would've also liked to have seen some focused personal writing about something the students’’ had experienced during their holidays. I would have liked to have seen these displayed well along with portraits or drawing featuring some aspect of the experience. To ensure students achieve best results teachers need to teach their students some simple presentation skills.

 

At the bottom of his post, Bruce had some practical links to unit ideas, lesson plans, ideas for the classroom environment and wall displays.

 

So it got me thinking, would Bruce be impressed with my classroom? 

 

Granted, I've made a big effort to have my class looking great by the end of Week 7 for three reasons:

• I want the children to know that their work and learning is valued.
• I want the parents to know their children are learning and to celebrate it.
• We had the school centenary last weekend and I wanted to impress all the visitors (I got great responses from past pupils, teachers and families - one lady was even taking photos of the children's work around the room!).

So here are some photos from around my room.  I kind of walked around in a clockwise direction from my desk (but avoided photographing that bombsite!).

 

Firstly, this is the display of the first unit we did this year.  It's average by my standards.  The Vocab Expander was a language activity for some of the more able in my class.  The flags were from earlier in the term when we made up our own flag designs in response to John Key's initiation of the change the flag debate.  Below those are some pictures from a social studies resource about the Treaty.  And the projects to the right are two of four research projects by four students.

 



We have been doing geometry shapes and objects for maths.  The children used these shapes to help them describe the attributes of each shape.  They had to include how many sides and corners the shape had, and if the sides were straight, curved or continuous.  Each group had three students (one had four), and as a group they recorded the attributes, which is what those little cards dangling from each shape are.  Of course, despite having the correct spelling for most words needed on the board, some of the spelling is rather creative.

And here are more of the flags hanging on the wire across the back of the room.

Bruce wanted to see writing about the children's holidays.  Well here it is!!  No pictures sorry Bruce!!  And I must confess that I typed up 13/16 stories.  But the kids did get to choose the fonts, colours and borders.  It was purely a time thing.

Brendon McCullum made history with his 302 runs, and it was a great opportunity to write stories about it from Brendon's point of view.  The language that some of the children used to describe how Brendon may have felt inside of himself was great.  You may also notice that one story in the picture above and in the pictures below are actually photos.  One student has Downs Syndrome, so we used pictures from his family holiday, or photos of him playing cricket or things he likes doing or creating the same kind of picture so he has a 'story' too.

These are some of my resources for Te Reo Maori that I have made myself over the years.

During the summer holidays I saw this awesome photo on a Facebook feed I follow and I pinned it in

Pinterest as I thought it would be a great first week art activity.  I love it.  Just something simple, yet effective.

I wanted to reinforce the idea that we are all different and it's ok not to be the same.  This activity was also very good for including my special needs student and for the new Year 4s who need to learn about presentation.

I love calendars because of the amazing photography.  We were given a box of calendars on the Waikato that were from 2012 last year.  So I gave each child a calendar and asked them to choose the picture that spoke to them.  I really pushed using adjectives and similes (because it's the "done thing" to do now - and I didn't know what they were until I'd been teaching a few years and my stories at school were good!).  Yeah, I confess that I typed 11/14 stories.... but the kids choose the colours, fonts and borders!!

From a poem we were reading we got on the simile bandwagon.  For a change I got the kids to write them out and we kept the 'design' simple - go over the writing in felt, colour in the background with jovis or coloured pencils.

Here are the Bio Poems that I blogged about the other week.  I'm still so in love with them!!  I think it is the contrast of the black and white photo and text against the coloured background.  This time the kids did the typing.  However, I confess I printed out the photos.  The rest is all kid labour.

These pictures were created by tracing around 2-D shapes and then colouring them in.  Then I got them to write about what shapes they used to make different aspects of the picture.  Not the most exciting writing, but I have some kids that still struggle to match the name of the shape with the shape - not good in a class ranging from Year 4-8.

Ok, here is the commercial stuff - maps and flags.  We refer to the maps a lot.  I want kids to know where places are in New Zealand and the rest of the world.  It was something my teacher was big on when I was a kid, and I'm still grateful for it now.  I also think that it is important that they can recognise flags of different countries.  A bit of 'useless' general knowledge never hurt anyone, but might save them some embarrassment (or even their lives) if/when they do an OE.

The Thinking Hats by DeBono.  I refer to these a lot with our critical thinking.  Also you can see some Te Reo Maori resources I purchased from a local group as their fundraiser a few years ago.  And yes, that is a whiteboard beside an ActivBoard.

The big flower, bees and poppies were actually made last year, but I love them, so they are staying until a replacement display is made.  Yep, there is the commercialised literacy stuff on the walls for the children to refer to.  And that is my flag I bought to take to All Black games on my OE - I like to have it displayed as a reminder that my forebears fought under that flag for New Zealand.

And this is the next step on our geometry journey.  After demonstrating and teaching each child how to draw 3-D objects as you can see from photos of the kids books above of their efforts (love doing this on the ActivBoard), we then moved on to creating them with straws (below).  The next step will be to make the objects from nets.  They will be displayed from coat hangers hanging on more wire and will also have cards with the attributes of each object described.

So that is a trip around my classroom at the end of Week 8.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Maybe there is something you can take away from it.  And if you have any tips, they will be gratefully received.