Bulletin boards make excellent surfaces for announcements and art projects. They are easy to keep clean and easy to reuse, making them a perfect place for children to express their creativity in the classroom or library. You can not only use a bulletin board to decorate your classroom, but also encourage your students to add their ideas and give book reports about the required literature they must read during the school year.
Design bulletin boards around the seasons. Choose books that reflect a current season and create visual artwork that expresses various aspects of the season. For example, you can represent spring with budding trees, flying kites and flowers just ready to bloom. Label each image with the name of a book on the book list.
Create an interactive exercise with your students by matching book titles to picture images. Let each child draw the name of a title from a hat. Help them create images that represent the book's title and pin those images on the bulletin board. Then, play a game and ask them to try to match the correct author name and book title to its image.
Choose books that represent the holidays and inspire your students to read by having them draw images about those holidays to place on the bulletin board. Make a theme for each holiday and use the students' drawings to decorate the board.
Use the bulletin board to help students give their book reports. Instead of requiring them to write out their reports, young children may be inspired to make a pictograph as a report describing their book. As each child gives her report, have her place her images on the board before talking about the book.
Make a birthday bulletin board to announce each child's birthday. Allow each child the opportunity to place the names of books he wants to read on the bulletin board. Encourage the children to research and add authors and to make pictures representing the title of the book.