Relationship Building Jamboard Templates:
My very first day back with students this semester was the day after the attack on the US Capitol. Since we are on a block schedule, I had all new students that I had never met before and was feeling extremely anxious . Knowing that I didnt want to ignore what had just happened or put on an inauthentic first-day face, I quickly made a simple Jamboard template to let students process the event before we moved on.
This only took a few minutes, but it set the tone for this class, provided a safe place to talk , and gave me some insight into how they are handling this moment in history.
Other ways to use Jamboard to build relationships include:
Would you rather grabbers To pique students interest before reading while also keeping it personal, think of a would you rather question that relates to the text. For example, before reading Of Mice and Men, you might ask: Would you rather have a big dream but never accomplish it or never allow yourself to dream at all?
Learning Targets Bulletin Board
Ensure that your students know what they are learning with this useful learning targets bulletin board. Editable pieces are included. Your administration will appreciate your objectives being posted front and center in your classroom. Easily create a bulletin board display, or attach posters and headers to a whiteboard to simply write your I can statements.
Repurpose Old Planner Pages As Wall Art
If you feel like you wasted money on that adorable planner that you abandoned after a month, then this hack is for you! Remove the cute pages before each month and then repurpose them in cheap frames for cute wall art! The prints below are from my Happy Planners and the frames are from the Dollar Tree.
- I recycled my planner pages with $1 frames.
- I saved these cute pages from my planner.
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High School Classroom Decor: Semi Flexible Seating In A Secondary Ela Classroom
A Tour of My High School English Classroom: our daily routinesmy researchQuiet Power: The Hidden Strengths of Introverted KidsQuiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Cant Quit TalkingHow big is your room and how many students do you need to fit in it?Here are some other angles: Other Classroom Design Choices: Lamps-this interview from The Cult of Pedagogy.Lamp Sources: Flameless Battery Powered Remote Controlled Candles two of these Seating- fun and FREE classroom design challengeWRAPPING PAPERSpoonflower this pattern out of books Liven Up Your Classroom with this Budget-Friendly DIY If you would like to learn how to create your own classroom posters and banners, you can take my class here: Poster Design Class: How to Make Posters for Your Classroom ceiling track clamps
| You can see that I also added a little whimsy with an old curtain tie. |
| The posters at the top are part of a Harry Potter Language Novel Study I designed. |
Add An Affirmation Mirror
Do you have a classroom mirror set up?
If a positivity tree isnt for you maybe you just dont have the space try this instead. Print the positive affirmation cards, and hang them all around your classroom mirror for some positive reminders each time you or your students take a peek at yourselves.
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Abstract Thinking Jamboards Templates:
Creative thinking is a skill that I value and practice daily in the classroom. Because of their blank slate nature, Jamboards make the perfect tool for generating abstract thinking. Here are some Jamboard ideas:
The no wrong answer template helps students think outside the box. For example, if you are reading Lord of the Flies, you can put Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack on the Jamboard. Students would then articulate who doesnt belong based on their thinking.
The book bar graph is a fun way of thinking that Ive used with teaching The Great Gatsby and Animal Farm. You can find detailed examples by reading those posts, but essentially, you can use the bar graph method to track anything from color symbolism to propaganda techniques to authors craft.
Greet Each Day With A Sign
Classroom greetings can set the tone for the rest of the school day. Have some fun and decorate your doorway with some creative greeting ideas. Students can point to or tap the greeting they want to exchange with you for a fun interaction that will start the day off right.
here, or check out this fun rainbow version!
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Focus On Student Showmanship
Focus your decor on student work. You can regularly change out what you showcase and give your students a sense of pride and responsibility for their work. I personally love using banners because they cover all the seasons and major events in the school year, and I can always use blank ones if I want to really let their creativity show. You can also find creative ways to use simple paper chains work towards a personal reading goal, write sentence examples for a grammar study, or make a countdown until break chain. You can even go so far as to create a space that is entirely student-created, and they can decide what will be posted and maintained on the board.
Use Your Clock As Part Of Your Decor
Your kids are bound to look at your classroom clock a LOT over the course of the school year, so make good use of that prime piece of real estate.
Teacher Jeanie Culip used hers as the o in you for this inspiring message, but the sky is really the limit here!
Use it as the o in dozens of other words, add flower petals to make it look like a flower , or even add some pom-poms for a flash of color!
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Classroom Decorating Ideas For Secondary Teachers
Pencil Background Purchased from Jax and Jake
Yeah we secondary ed teachers cant use those.
I can just imagine the looks on my 9th graders faces if they walked through a door that said This is the place to BEE! . They would laugh me right out of the hive. This is probably why many high school teachers just slap a few literary device posters on the wall and call it a day, and I get it.
However, I also LOVE decorating my room, and I think that even though they would never admit it, students like being in a nice-looking room. Since I moved to a new school this year, I started from scratch, tossing around lots of different themes before finally settling on a combination of two. I am putting the finishing touches on my room tomorrow photos to come soon!
In the meantime, here are a few themes that actually DO work for middle and high school classrooms:
1. Social Media
2. Chevron Print
Though its a teensy bit girly, chevron is an easy way to bring a cohesive look to your room. Plus, its pretty popular right now, so its easy to find. Pick your favorite two or three colors and do it up! I have some chevron table cloths from years ago that I use to brighten up and de-institutionalize tables, and you can find some inexpensive chevron fabric to use as a bulletin board background. You can even find Chevron Bulletin Board Borders in many colors online! Pick up some chevron motivational posters and a chevron printable binder set, and youre good to go!
Image via Wall Prints
Set Up A Chill Out Zone
Social and emotional development is part and parcel of going to school, and with that comes learning to self-regulate your emotions. But thats tough for all of us especially the little kiddos we see day in and day out. Setting up a chill-out corner or zone in your classroom gives kids a place to go when they just need a place to gather themselves before they return to their regularly scheduled programming.
Get everything you need to set up your own chill out zone here.
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Group Work Jamboard Templates:
I recently presented to a group of teachers in New Jersey about using podcasts in the classroom, and when it was over, they were like thats cool but lets talk about those Jamboard templates you used haha. Kidding, they were really into my podcast ideas, but were also impressed by my Jamboard activities for collaboration!
A big pro over Padlet is that Jamboard will allow you to have multiple sides going at the same time. This means you can have one group of students working on one slide of the SAME Jamboard while others are on their own assigned slide. This is GAME CHANGER for facilitating collaborations in a virtual or Covid classroom setting.
For my presentation, I put teachers into breakout rooms and told them which slide they should focus on. Breakout room one worked on slide 1 etc. HOWEVER, this was a semi-fail because of this Jamboard con: links are not clickable in a Jamboard , therefore, it took much longer than needed for such a simple task , but I reflected and somewhat solved this before recommending it to the masses.
Heres the solution:
Tell students exactly what to Google and what their article should look like
OR, get the links to them via the chat feature on Zoom.
OR, have the links posted in Canvas or whatever LMS you use.
Now, once students read the article or section you want them to read, they will use a color-coded sticky note to write down their thoughts. There are 5 sticky note colors in Jamboard, so you can have up to 5 groups.
Genius Classroom Decorating Ideas For 2022
Are you looking for some fresh new ideas for decorating your classroom this year? It doesnt matter whether youre a veteran teacher or this is your first year teaching, learning new decorating hacks for your classroom that will make your life a whole lot easier is what this blog is about!
The teacher team at Teach Starter has been right where you are, standing in an empty classroom, looking all around those cement walls and wondering where the heck do I even start. So we decided to make your classroom decorating easier this year. We rounded up some of our very favorite decorating hacks for teachers, some of our coolest classroom decorating resources, plus some tips from our entire teacher teams years in the classroom to make back-to-school decorating a lot easier in 2022 and hopefully a lot more fun!
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Add Some Greenery To Brighten Up Your Room And Boost Your Mood
Greenery will brighten up your classroom, but studies have shown that plants can even improve your mood in a variety of ways. Plants can make you happy by lowering your stress, boosting your well-being, improving your productivity, and more.
If youre anything like me and cant keep living plants alive, then you can opt for some inexpensive fake greenery! While artificial plants dont have the exact same host of benefits, they can still improve your mood. Even looking at landscapes and scenes of nature can give you a boost in positivity and concentration! My classroom or workspace would not be complete without fake flowers, which I usually find at the Dollar Tree, Target Dollar Spot, or on clearance at craft stores like Michaels or Jo-Ann Fabrics.
- A few fake flowers go a long way!
- I purchased these at the Dollar Tree!
Classrooms Should Be Engaging Not Distracting
Thats not to say that every wall must be bare. In 2015, a team of researchers in the U.K. analyzed 153 classrooms and found that students benefited most when the walls had some decorations. The displays on the walls should be designed to provide a lively sense to the classroom, but without becoming chaotic in feel. As a rule of thumb, 20 to 50 percent of the available wall space should be kept clear, the researchers wrote.
So what do researchers say teachers should do?
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Check For Understanding Jamboard Templates:
If you are looking for a quick way to check for understanding or give a digital exit ticket, a Jamboard can do it! It can be as simple as asking students to post one thing they learned in a what stuck with you digital sticky note, or a little more advanced with Jamboard templates like the target one below where you place your target standard in the middle and have students use stickies to show what they know. You as the teacher can move the stickies around to show which responses best hit the target.
Diy Classroom Decor Tips
7. How to DIY Curriculum Boxes to Cute Book Display Boxes Dont spend a lot on containers. Use what you have like scrapbook paper to refinish old curriculum boxes a functional way to display your classroom library or featured books.
8. How to Display Posters Away from the Wall Make the hard work you stand out. Literally! Use dixie cups to make your clip chart for behavior or for tracking students writing process pop out from the wall.
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Use Fabric Or Burlap To Create Cute Borders For Bulletin Boards
Add a little extra flair to your bulletin boards with fabric or burlap. This can stand alone or complement your existing borders. All you have to do is bunch/scrunch and staple your fabric. Dont worry about it being perfect its not supposed to be! Theres no science to it: just bunching/scrunching and stapling!
- Wired ribbon from Jo-Ann Fabrics
- Burlap from Jo-Ann Fabrics
Create A Positivity Walk
Carry along the positivity theme by creating a positivity walk for your students! Hang posters that encourage a growth mindset near where they line up to go to lunch or along the wall outside of your classroom, so theyve always got a reminder to look on the bright side of life! You could use some of our positivity posters, our growth mindset pennant banners, and include their names, photos, or an avatar of each of your students to really reinforce that this positivity walk belongs to them!
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Dos And Donts Of Classroom Decorations
What you put on your classroom walls can affect your students ability to learn.
Heavily decorated classrooms can bombard students with too much visual information, interfering with their memory and ability to focus, a new study finds.
This is just the latest study to examine the relationship between classroom environment and students executive functions, which include skills like memory, attention, and self-regulation. While teachers have good intentions when decorating, many classrooms end up being sensory-rich in a way that could hamper childrens learning gains rather than help, according to psychologists Pedro Rodrigues and Josefa Pandeirada, who coauthored the study.
To understand how decorations affect learning, Rodrigues and Pandeirada recruited 64 children between 8 and 12 years old to perform attention and memory tasks in two groups. For the high-decoration group, the walls of the room were covered with numerous pictures of ordinary objects and scenes, such as cars, musical instruments, and trees. Walls in the control groups room, on the other hand, were bare.
Compared to children in the bare-wall room, children in the high-decoration room performed worse on all tests, which suggests that too much visual stimulus can be a distraction.
Overall, the results from these studies indicate that children could have difficulty in ignoring visual distractors when these are embedded in the surrounding environment, the study authors explain.
English Language Arts Classroom Set Up Ideas
- I like to arrange students in groups facing board. I also share a classroom, so I have to be flexible of other Ts preferences.
- I provide options & they have a home in a traditional seat
Q4: What are your favourite ways to display student work and evidence of learning?
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Creative Jamboard Templates For The Ela Classroom
Inspired by an enthusiastic coworker whos been using Jamboard to teach virtually, I recently tried and jammed out on some Jamboard templates in the classroom. The reason I put off using Jamboard for so long is because I thought Jamboards were too similar to Padlet which Ive used for years, and too difficult for my Microsoft students to cross over on a Google classroom account.
I was wrong and have been missing out! Though Jamboard is similar to Padlet, you get unlimited FREE boards while gaining more functions. As far as accounts go, students DO NOT need a Jamboard login or an account to use Jamboard! YAYAYAYA *Plays Space Jam sound track and dances around an empty classroom. All you need to use Jamboard as a teacher is a personal or professional Google account .
Therefore, Im now about to do that annoying thing where I rave about something that is old news to everyone else because this blog post is going to have my recent Jamboard obsession on BLAST. Im going to show you all the creative ways Ive used Jamboard in my virtual and hybrid ELA classroom so whether you are an advanced Jamboard user or the last one to know about this amazing EDU tech tool, I hope youll have plenty of takeaways from these Jamboard ideas!
