Prefixes, Suffixes, Root Words

Here is the beginning of my Prefix/Suffix/Root Word reference wall.

This is very useful and encouraging to English language learners whose first language is Latin based (like Spanish). They already know a lot of these word pieces from their L1 and this helps them to figure out L2 words quickly from context. It's a great vocabulary builder.

Colorful Synonyms

ESL students need all the vocabulary they can get, but it is not always effective to simply give them lists to memorize. The first day back from Christmas vacation, we did this activity with the goal of opening up a whole lot of words to ELL's very quickly and visually. Since the board went up, students have also used it as a reference for enhancing thier writing. It's a visual thesaurus.

Creation:
I collected paint chips in a variety of colors and each student got 5 of them to work with. They started with a boring, over-used word like 'good' and wrote it on the palest color block. Then, they looked up thier word up in the thesaurus and as they found richer words, they wrote them on the more vibrant color blocks progressively until they reached something like 'magnificent.'

I collected the paint chips and layered the colors to make this collage. It's a very simple activity with minimal prep and it's the bulletin board that keeps on giving as a working reference.

GOAL!

My students love soccer. I made this board as part of a goal setting activity - the students wrote some of thier life goals in a journal and then committed to action that they could take first semester in order to move toward those goals. They all signed the game ball with one of thier goals.

Creation:
Found an image of the 2010 World Cup ball, projected it onto butcher paper, traced, cut, layered with colored paper underneath the black areas.

The net was made by stapling black twine over the ball, contoured to give a 3D illusion of the ball hitting the net. I again used Google Images to find a 3D sphere grid and approximated it with the string. This took a lot of staples.

Welcome

This board was inspired by Banksy. If you don't know of him, look him up. Stuff of legend. This is my first year with my own classroom and my bulletin board is 16 feet long! It's my favorite classroom tool. I wanted a happy, eye popping board to intrigue the students when they came in the first day. This was up for a few months.

Creation:

Found a picture of a chimp on Google Images and projected it onto my white board. Traced the light/dark dominant areas onto butcher paper. Then I cut out the light areas and the outline with an exacto knife and placed contrasting paper underneath.

The rays were made by stapling yellow paper onto the bulletin board and with a ruller, tracing them out from a vanishing point. Then I simply stapled them up, starting with the central piece and fanning out from there.

Bonus: Pin wheels.