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First impressions are so important in every walk of life. The younger the mind, the truer this adage rings, as every new experience is something indelible that may last a lifetime. Each classroom I was a part of during my elementary school years was colored by how a given teacher saw fit to decorate its bulletin boards, chalkboards, walls, and desks. If the decorations were gaudy, corny, unfitting, or sparse, this left an imprint, and helped me form attitudes about how this teacher saw his or her job and thoughts of us. If the decorations were too gaudy, corny, or unfitting, it would just give students more ammunition to give the teacher a hard time. If a room was too sparse, we would think the teacher didn't care too much about us or her job any more than what was required of him or her. If the decorations seemed "beneath" our perceived levels of maturity, we might be tempted to lose some modicum of respect for the teacher for condescending to us. If they tried to invoke pop culture without truly understanding it, this was considered gauche as well. It is important for a teacher to be able to connect with and relate to his or her students. Understanding what is important to a student is a great doorway to understanding that student, what makes him or her tick, and what drives or holds him or her back.

Some of my earliest memories are of the decorations I saw circling the walls of my kindergarden class. No class was complete without a march of all the letters of the alphabet, both capital and lowercase, brightly colored, laminated, and bedecked and adorned with depictions of items that start with the given letter. For kids who may have not been exposed to reading at home, these were the first times they were exposed to symbols that would form the building blocks of language for them. It was important to keep these symbols bright, cheery, mysterious, and exciting, to foster a love of learning and eventually reading. I vividly remember the excitement I felt as we learned about each new letter and watched accompanying episodes of "The Letter People," to help us familiarize us with how each letter would be used. By the same token, exposures to single digit numbers in this same manner is important for kids. Make them big, almost larger than life, and give each one a purpose, and they'll come alive in each child's imagination.

On bulletin board and walls: thematically, most every classroom I remember was tied together each month thanks to a teacher's diligence in creating a season appropriate spread on a bulletin board or free wall. Accents help to punctuate the season of time a class is currently experiencing, or a theme that a class is studying. Leaves in the autumn, snowflakes in the fall, flora and fauna in spring: these are just three examples of the many ways you can spruce up your board.

On spare walls, teachers may create wall charts, giving students even more incentive to learn and achieve. In my second grade year, our teacher had a chart where the simple act of reading a book and passing a quiz on it would net us a star. It was an empty, meaningless little token on the surface, a small adhesive sticker stuck to poster board. But that sense of competition with our fellow students generated feelings of community and camaraderie which would help us appreciate reading more as a gateway to knowledge that would serve us for years to come.

Later on in my educational career, this blossomed into a year long school wide competition in which we would be challenged to read books of varying levels of difficulty, complexity, depth, and breadth, and on varying topics. We would get a card with six blanks in which to fill out six different titles. They would be of at least four different genres and two wildcards. Once a week we would get an opportunity to take quizzes on what we had read on the computers in the school's media center. If we passed, we would get a sticker signifying we had completed the requirement for that spot on that card. Once we filled that card, we'd move on to the next card. Each card level had a different color, and each level had more cards in it. So once we got to the fifth level and finished it, we had read ninety books over the course of a year. Students had great fun seeing what books each of their classmates chose to read. They discussed what kinds of questions were on the quizzes they took. They competed with each other to get to the next level fastest and see just how many books they could read. At the end of the school year, there was even a part of the awards ceremony where students who reached a certain level of accomplishment in this reading program would be awarded certificates and trophies. Simple trinkets, to be sure. But in the minds of students, they symbolize a yearlong effort to shoot for a touch of greatness. This was a great way for teachers to encourage students to read and love it. This is a lesson for teachers as well: if ever you have difficulty getting students to have enthusiasm about a subject, make a competition of it!

Seasonal decorations on both bulletin boards and walls help students place themselves in this world with respect to its traditions. It helps them learn about traditions and form opinions about them. An effective spread will not just decorate its wall with images from each season. It will illuminate paths less traveled in their previous educational experiences, and hopefully expound on what they have already been exposed to. There is so much more to the human experience, and to what children experience as the flow of time, than autumn, winter, spring, and summer and a temporary reprieve from school.

A colorful, well designed calendar will help students to understand how we mark off time by day, week, month, and year. A calendar can be interactive, too. For example, you may wish to put birthdates of each student up on your class's calendar during the month they occur. For students whose birthdates occur outside of the scope of the traditional school year, be sure not to leave them out. If you have a traditional August to June calendar year, consider celebrating students who have just had their birthdays in August as a way to kick off the school year with a bang. For those who were born in June, include them at the end of the year festivities. July birthdays are always the toughest. Use what you think is your best judgment to make sure students born in months not included in the school year still feel included.

A calendar can help students grow accustomed to the customs of our culture and expose them to customs of other cultures as well. Traditionally, each month has mentally been associated with one or two key events, but you can help shape those preconceived notions, by opening up a child's mind to new cultures and way of life. This can prepare them for a more harmonious relationship to cultures and people different than themselves, thus preparing them to cope better as they grow up and form connections with the world around them. What follows is a list of potential selected topics you may wish to explore on your calendars and bulletin boards during each month of the school year.

September - Labor Day / Back to School / Autumn
October - Halloween / All Hallow's Eve / Canadian Thanksgiving / Bartolomé de Las Casas, in lieu of Columbus Day
November - Veteran's Day / Thanksgiving
December - Winter / Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice
January - New Years Traditions / Presidents Day
February - Groundhog Day / St. Valentine's Day / Black History Month
March & April - Spring / Easter
May - Memorial Day / Mothers Day
June - Flag Day / Fathers Day / Summer

As students get older, teachers may wish to explore more eclectic holidays or noteworthy events and occurrences in each month, so as to encourage students to be curious about the world around them and its traditions. As they get older, they will be more curious about alternatives to the norm, and asking why a society frames things in a certain way is vital to understanding where we come from and where we are going. Some holidays are secular, some may have religious roots, but it is of utmost importance that teachers find the balance between educating and proselytizing. The classroom is no place for the latter. Children are highly susceptible to influence of adults and their minds are malleable. If anything, it is important to stress to them tolerance for all different beliefs, and not laud any one particular belief system over another.

In addition to the calendar you'd find on your classroom's bulletin board, each month you can hand out calendars on ditto sheets with artwork celebrating that month's events. Allow students to decorate and color their calendars. If your school has a laminating machine available, running these calendars through it puts a nice finishing touch on the art project. Now this calendar may be used to track assignments and reward students for good behavior and accomplishments. Consider perhaps a unit of earth science. A chart is a great way to track a sort of scavenger hunt. You might scout the school grounds ahead of time and see which flora, fauna, and even animals are indigenous to your area. During recess award points, stars, smilies, or other accolades for students who are able to call to your attention the various examples and instances of these lifeforms on school grounds. This may be a rather short lived use of a chart, but your creativity can stretch it even further.

Charts of all types have decorated school classroom walls for years. There are many ways to use charts for great effect to encourage your students to succeed and foster a classroom environment conducive to great strides in learning. One of my earlier memories is in my second grade class. My teacher used a chart to track our progress in reading. For every book we read and completed a quiz, we'd get a colored star to celebrate the accomplishment. It's fuzzy now whether the stars were colored based on the number of books we had read, or we got to choose our own colored star at whim, but each way has its merits. Charts can also be used to reward behavior, track attendance, or track a class's collective efforts to any number of goals. As with anything, you are only limited by your creativity and the lengths which you are willing to go to inspire greatness in your students.

Posters may be a great source of inspiration for students. Be they a witty quip or a sage saying, they may fill their minds and hearts with the courage to stand up for their convictions, take chances, and strive for greatness in a world where convictions are constantly challenged, and greatness can only be had when one is not afraid of the risk involved. One of the posters that always stuck out in my mind when I was a kid was of an expression that seemed ubiquitous: "What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular."

Elementary school is in most cases a child's first true interactions with his or her peers. It is difficult to be considered different than your peers, by your peers. It is difficult to stand out from the crowd in an unpopular way. And it only gets more difficult as the years go by. Middle school and high school are especially challenging. While these years may seem long and arduous to a young mind, it is important to stress first how transitory they really are, and second how inconsequential the opinions of your peers are about you in the long run.

Instilling a sense of a pride on one's convictions in the face of dissent and possibly ridicule is one of the strongest virtues a young child can learn to grow. That, and sound judgment can go a long way towards helping a student to live a life where he or she feels in control of her choices, beliefs, and destiny. Of course, it is important that a child also be taught to measure these beliefs and make sure that they make sense. It is important for one to have the confidence to stand up when in the right, and back down when in the wrong.

A teacher who espouses these philosophies must also be willing to be a beacon in a sea of uncertainty. He or she must respect the student and his or her sensitive, burgeoning beliefs, and help him or her to grow into a young adult who has a sense of responsibility that matches them. Children are great at detecting hypocrisy. In the case of this poster and quote, one must be careful not to contribute to the persecution of that which is different and allow for a free exchange of ideas in the classroom. All too often, a teacher makes an honest mistake and is unable to admit his or her wrongness in the matter. This only causes a student to lose respect for the teacher and breed cynicism in a student's mind and heart. Over the years this can snowball, and the result does more harm than a teacher just admitting a mistake instead of trying to save face.

This lengthy example is meant to illustrate a larger picture. Students reasoning skills are also just being developed. So however a teacher chooses to decorate his or her classroom, it is important that a consistent, unified message be presented in the rhetoric on the walls in relationship to what comes out of your mouth. For seven hours each day, you are the authority figure in twenty to thirty some odd students' lives, and this continues for one hundred eighty days. The world is chaotic and is prone to hypocrisy at every turn, everywhere one looks. One may argue that there is little fairness and justice in the real world, so why should anyone expect a student be surrounded by unified messages? The answer is simple: things won't get better unless we change the way we help kids to experience the world. By insisting on veracity and consistency of message, we can help them to perpetuate those beliefs, thus creating in small part a better society for future generations.

Chalkboards are a great way to encourage interactivity in students. Traditional white and yellow sticks of chalk come standard as part of any teacher's school supplies. However, if you want to spice things up and keep things a little more interesting, invest in thick chalk. It is easier to grip, especially for younger children, and it is fun to use. Even more fun is colored chalk. It is not only a great change of pace from the bland white and yellow colors students are used to. It also can be used during recess to occupy and entertain those students who are more artistically than athletically inclined. Blacktop makes a great canvas, and having art sessions outdoors can be a great change of pace.

Dry erase boards have been around for years, but only have seen prominence in the classrooms in recent years. If you are fortunate enough to have a dry erase board in your classroom, do yourself a favor and invest in several sets of dry erase markers. There are advantages and disadvantages to having a dry erase board over chalk. Chalk never dries out, but it is several times more messy than dry erase markers. Chalk has a tendency to get on your clothes. I have several memories of teachers who would always stand a little too close to the chalkboard, brush up against it while they were teaching or writing, and wind up with their clothes covered in chalk by the end of the day. It will come out in the wash in most cases, of course, but it is a minor distraction that can be avoided. Dry erase markers downside is that they can of course dry out. And the younger a child is, the less likely he or she is to remember to put the cap back on when done using it. Some dry erase markers can tend to leave more permanent marks on the board if they are left for too long, but if your marker is of a good quality and you clean your board regularly this shouldn't be a problem. Dry erase markers are also quieter. Chalk is notorious for squeaking on occasion as it is dragged across the chalkboard. This can annoy your students and possibly yourself, and cause unneeded distractions at inopportune times.

There are many supplies for both chalkboards and dry erase boards. Chalkboards can be cleaned simply with a damp rag. Dry erase boards need water or a special spray to ensure that the special ink from the markers doesn't linger longer than is wanted. If you are teaching handwriting, you may wish to purchase a chalk stand. Stands which hold three to five pieces are ideal. They sit comfortably in the chalk tray, and when you put multiple pieces of chalk in them and turn them sideways, they serve as great tools for making straight horizontal lines on which you may instruct students how to properly write letters and numbers in both manuscript and cursive. Earlier, I suggested you buy multiple sets of markers in different colors. This allows students to participate and express themselves when they are asked to contribute to an activity at the board. To lengthen the life of your markers be careful not to leave the caps off, and not to mix colors. Doing so will cross contaminate them and decrease their effectiveness in a lot of cases.

All in all, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to what all goes into preparing and decorating a classroom for the typical elementary school class. From the moment a student sets foot in your classroom, a tone is established that carries on for the whole year. Be sure to set the right mood with careful consideration of every aspect of theme and motif on every part of your classroom's decorations from the bulletin board and chalkboard to their desks and the walls around them!

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