Bulletin Board--October

October:

Every month I update my hallway bulletin board.  One of the most frustrating things when it comes to bulletin boards, is coming up with an idea for the bulletin boards.  During the month of October my students were studying poetry.  I decided to create a Poet Tree as our bulletin board.

The idea when we began was that students would write their own poems on larger leaves, and those would be placed around the poet tree.  This picture was taken before I added those student poem leaves.  Here is what I did to create the Poet Tree: 

I stapled white paper as my background (I felt the color of the leaves would stand out more against the white backdrop, though any color really would work).  Next, I found a cardboard box and opened it up.  To create a bark effect, I scraped pieces of the top layer of cardboard off, so that the corrugated pieces of cardboard showed through.  Next I took green construction paper and sliced it in order to resemble grass.  I layered the grass in two rows to give it a fuller effect.  Next, I traced a maple leaf design onto multi-colored construction paper and hand-cut all those maple leaves.  (This is the part that using dye-cut leaves or owning a machine like the Cricut really would have come in handy.)  On a handful of leaves I wrote the first lines of my favorite poems.  The poem lines became an extra credie project for my students.  They were instructed to find which poem a line came from, then they needed to copy the poem down, and finally, they needed to write a short poem analysis (since that's what we were working on in class).  The lettering is 172 pt. font Bernard Condensed (Microsoft Word) which I printed and cut out on construction paper.  I realize that is sounds like a lot of work, but I feel the display was beautiful and the students did a great job with exploring the poems from the Poet Tree.