Spicing Up Your Word Wall

This is the time of year when many teachers are stepping back into the classroom after a relaxing summer break to tackle room arrangement.  And if school is not yet in session, you can bet most teachers are thinking about how to set up the perfect classroom environment.

One aspect of this in the early elementary grades centers on the word wall.  Teachers ask, "Where do I put it?" and "How should the letters be displayed?"

In our class we developed answers to these questions over the years through trial and error.  We are a dual language school utilizing both English and American Sign Language so we wanted our word wall to be representative of that.

Our idea was to take pictures of the children signing the manual alphabet.  Next we uploaded the photographs to an image hosting site, such as Photobucket,  and edited each one to include the printed letter. You can play around with letter placement, font, color and size as needed.

You can go from this...

to this!

Last year we painted over our blackboard with magnetic primer and attached magnetic tape to the back of the index cards we used for each word on the word wall. We wanted our students to be able to take the words off the wall easily if they needed them during writing or word study.

It is a nice way to get all of the children invested in the word wall and it also puts forth the feeling that the classroom belongs to everyone.

I even had my own letter - G!