Back to School Bulletin Boards

I love coming up with fresh bulletin boards each year.  I like to scour the internet for fresh ideas.  So I thought I'd post some of my favorites that I've done over the last few years.  My absolute favorite is this iPad bulletin board.  We got a grant for 1:1 iPads two years ago and I created this bulletin board to showcase all of the topics that we learn in 3rd grade.

Each "app" on the iPad shows one of the topics that we study during the year.

Another beginning of the year bulletin board that I love is this sunflower one.

This one is a great kick off to our plant unit which is our first science unit. The kids make the sunflowers the first week of school. (I originally got the idea from the Family Corner  website, but tweaked it to add some extra depth.) The yellow petals are actually coffee filters.  Each kid gets 3 or 4 filters and scallop cuts the edges.  Then they stack all of their filters together and fold them into fourths (so it looks like a piece of pizza.)  Then we mix yellow food color and water together and they let their filters soak up the yellow color for a few hours.  They LOVE watching this process.  After they are dry, they glue them together in the center.  Then we spread glue around the center of the top one and sprinkle black sand in the middle.  Shake it off, let it dry and you have these cute flowers.  I also like to use different sized coffee filters so that we have different sized flowers in the end.

  

Here's a close up of one of the flowers.

Another one of my favorite beginning of the year  bulletin boards is this watermelon one, which I'm sorry to say that I forgot to take a picture of until it was halfway pulled down last year.  The title says "A Little Slice of Summer"

I have the kids write a story about their summer vacation on a piece of paper shaped like of of the watermelon seeds you see in the picture.  Only their paper is slightly smaller than the ones that you see, so the black paper acts as a border around their writing.  I use this writing piece as a pre-assessment in writing and it makes a cute bulletin board!

Another one of my favorites is this hot air balloon bulletin board.  Our town has a hot air balloon festival in the summer so it's a perfect starting board for our school year.  You can't see it very well, in the picture, but the trees have little bits of pink tissue paper stuck to them to look like blossoms.  (Which must mean that the year I took this picture I actually did this bulletin board in the spring.  :-) )  Either way, it's one of my favorites.  The balloons are made of little pieces of tissue paper glued down to a balloon shaped piece of paper. We used string and a square of construction paper for the baskets.

Finally, I have my Math Words bulletin board that gets put up at the beginning of every year.  As the year goes on we add more and more words to the board.  This picture is from about half way through last year.  The kids refer to it constantly as a reference for key math terms.