Mark the season or special holidays with a season-themed door. For all seasons, use texture to create interest and depth. Fall ideas include a textured tree with a trunk made from twisted brown paper and colorful, artificial leaves or an apple tree with student's names written on the apples. For winter, use a black background overlapped with a white sledding hill. Use cotton batting for the hill or white paper. Have the students create sleds to attach to the hill or snowflakes for the black sky area. Welcome spring with a huge flower made from material scraps, creating a petal for each student. Use textured material to make the flower's center. Add student-created butterflies or insects. Develop a beach scene for an end-of-the-year door. Use real sand for the beach, blue paper for water and yellow paper for a huge sun. Add details made by students like beach balls, umbrellas, buckets and shovels or crabs and fish.
A welcoming message on the door will invite students and families into the classroom all year long. Use a theme that connects with the rest of the classroom. For a frog theme, a door message might say, "Leap into Learning," with individual frogs for each student. For a play on words, create a school of fish with each student's name and write, "Welcome to School!" Use a piece of string to create a clothesline and attach each letter in the word "Welcome" to the string with a clothespin. Add pictures of students around the line.
Celebrate your school's sports teams and show school pride with a school-themed door. Use school colors for the background. Add the mascot to the center, then interchange items around the mascot as the sports season unfolds. Have the students make basketballs, footballs, tennis balls or softballs for each season. List the players' names and numbers on each ball or make spirit flags to arrange around the mascot. Keep track of wins and losses on a chart. Add pom-poms made from tissue paper strips for texture or a goal post made from painted cardboard tubes during football season.
Bring some of the learning going on inside the classroom out into the hallway with an interactive door display. Make word cards for each word the students have learned and "read the door" each time you leave the classroom as a group. Use a creative background, perhaps a tree or a schoolhouse. Hide letters around the scene and challenge students to find each letter and say its sound. Practice rhyming words by placing word cards randomly and ask students to match rhyming pairs. Use fabric fastener circles so children can easily remove and replace letters or word cards.