One approach to keeping children excited about learning new things or about activities coming up during a specific month is to create a set of characters that can help to introduce these activities. Developing your own cartoon characters isn't as difficult as you might think. Use a basic photo or drawing program on your computer to create your cartoon characters, or you can sketch out line drawings of characters and scan them in to you computer. You can then bring the line drawings in to a basic program like Microsoft Paint or a professional program like Photoshop where you can colorize your cartoons and make additional changes. Print your cartoons out on a quality paper or have them printed at a print shop or office supply store. Cartoons can be used to introduce children to a letter of the month or to a theme, like learning about animals.
Another idea to pursue for your classroom's monthly bulletin board is to use photos and graphics, such as clip art, to decorate your bulletin board. You can find a great deal of appropriate clip art online for free online as well as some clip art that you can purchase the rights to use. Photos and graphics can be used to reinforce the concepts you are teaching about that month. For example, for holidays you can add photos and graphics that relate to that holiday and point to the graphic when teaching children basic facts about the holiday. Graphics can also be used to add decorative elements like a border of leaves during the fall season.
Create images for your poster that look like trees or other inanimate objects, while at the same time being in the shape of letters or numbers. For example, the tree could have two branches on the side to form the letter "F." Another approach is to place a monthly game like a spinning wheel on your bulletin board that has a variety of images on it relating to that month. The child could spin the wheel and name the item that it lands on.