Fiction and Nonfiction Bulletin Board!

Oh, bulletin boards...a love/hate relationship.  I love doing bulletin boards, but sometimes things get so hectic it becomes tough to change them every month.  With that being said, I am pretty lucky because I don't have an actual bulletin board, I have these metal strips that hold student work.  It's nice because when I don't have time to get real creative, I can just slip some recent student work into the strips.  The part that stinks, is that when I want to do something fun and festive I have to get out 20 pounds of sticky-tac and adhere everything to the wall.  This month we have been really focusing on identifying fiction and nonfiction.  This is a tough concept, but we have been having a lot of fun learning with songs, center activities and much more.  We decided to showcase some of this work in the hallway with the help of a few snowy friends.  Sorry the pictures are a bit blurry, but you get the idea :)

My son is obsessed with Frozen and I haven't been able to get the songs out of my head all week!  "Do you want to build a snowman?"  My students love the movie as well so I just had to find a way to get Olaf up on that wall.  I love hearing the kids freak out when they walk by him in the hallway, I even caught a little girl hugging the wall yesterday haha.  So cute!

The student work displayed consists of various pages from our nonfiction retelling books and a sorting page for pictures of books we cut out of Scholastic Book Club magazines.  You can check out these products for more fiction and nonfiction fun!

Soapy Sight Word Fun

I am totally in love with word work this year!  I have always enjoyed it, but this year I am trying extra hard to make every day totally hands-on and loads of fun.  One activity that my students and I love is creating our sight words in shaving cream!  It is super fun, the kids get a ton of kinesthetic practice with their sight words and our desks look sparkling clean afterwords.

Just a few tips before your begin:
- Use unscented shaving cream, unless you want your room to smell like a men's locker room for a week.
- Have students roll up their sleeves, they will get messy :)  Good thing it is just soap and it will come right off, and usually fades by the end of the day.
- When finished, have students rub the shaving cream around until it disappears and then use baby wipes to clean off any residue.

        I usually start by prompting the kids with phrases similar to "write a sight word that starts with an L and rhymes with bike" or "write be, now erase the b and make it an m, what word do you have now?"  You can make up any fun riddles that you would like.  I also like to have them race to write the entire word wall from A to Z and write and share their favorite words with their friends.  The kids love getting messy and playing with their words, and so do I!

What is your favorite word work activity?