Activities
Bulletin boards are a great way to post important things. Teachers utilize bulletin board space to hang academic materials, learning resources for students, or notices and calendars to keep parents updated about what’s happening in the classroom. Interactive bulletin boards can be used for so much more! Create an interactive experience for your students to encourage them to practice new skills and stay fully involved in their education.
Interactive bulletin boards
1. Make a sorting station
Give your students a quick and easy way to practice a skill you’ve been working on in the classroom through sorting. Younger children can sort things by color or size while older students can sort math problems or animals who live in different habitats.
2. Create a matching game
Have your students match math problems to their answers, spelling words to their phonics sounds, or states to their capitals with an interactive matching game posted on a bulletin board.
3. Give students a game to play
Set up a bulletin board with a giant game board, such as sudoku. When students have a few minutes of free time they can make a move on the board.
4. Keep track of travels
This is a great bulletin board for social studies teachers. Put up a map of the United States or the world and have students add pictures or small tokens when they travel to a new place. Use the bulletin board to learn about important landmarks or historical events.
5. Encourage students to wonder
Hang up a sign that says, “I Wonder…” and encourage students to write down questions they have in response to what they are learning. Perhaps they will wonder about something they read, or a concept presented in science. Maybe they will wonder about an event in history or a current event. Periodically, you can read through them as a class and discuss them.
6. Make a giant coloring book
Coloring has been proven to lower stress and increase happiness, so why not create a huge coloring book for your students? Students can color when they have a few spare minutes, or they can take a break to go color if they feel stressed.
7. Make life size math boards
Turn a bulletin board into a giant math resource board. Create a giant multiplication chart or a huge hundreds chart. Students can reference the boards when they are a practicing their math facts. Make it even more interactive by covering up a number or two to see if students can figure out what’s missing.
8. Encourage kindness and recognition
Have students give each other shout-outs with a bulletin board that gives them space to hang up compliments to each other. Not only will you be creating a culture of kindness, but students will be competing to compliment their peers.
9. Play I Spy
Hang a random collection of items on interactive bulletin boards and create a list of things to find. You might include things that start with a certain letter or are shaped a certain way. Give students a list of things to find and let them see how many they can locate.
10. Make a giant wordsearch
Encourage your students to find phonics sounds, spelling words, or vocabulary words with a huge word search. It is an important skill to be able to find these things in context, and a word search is a fun way to practice.
11. Use a Venn diagram
Reinforce the concept of compare and contrast with a giant Venn diagram. Students can add their thoughts about how two different things, such as biomes, books, or places, are the same and different.
12. Have a tournament
Like March Madness or the NFL playoffs, students can fill in brackets with favorite movies or books. Students should be prepared to defend their choices.
13. Encourage deep discussion
Hang up a “Would You Rather” bulletin board. Once students have chosen their answer, the class can discuss the pros and cons of each choice. Then you can change the question and have another conversation!
14. Use QR codes
Create a mystery type bulletin board with QR codes. Students can scan the QR code to get clues to answer questions or they can simply give kids some in-depth information about people, places, or things you’re studying in the classroom.
15. Motivate your students
Do you want students who are healthy, happy, and motivated to learn? Use a bulletin board to hang up rip-off motivation posters. Each slip that gets ripped off will give students a life tip to help them make healthy food choices, exercise more, improve their grades, or get along better with their peers.
16. Make math interactive
Hang up a few challenging math problems that go with concepts you’re teaching in the classroom. When students have a few minutes of free time, they can work on figuring out the answers.
17. Make the students think
Hang up some boxes that look like French fry containers to encourage students to come up with new ideas and think outside the box. Students might fill the boxes with alternatives to overly used words or fill them with synonyms or antonyms. This is a great way to build your students’ vocabulary! Interactive boards are great for reinforcing learning in fun ways.
18. Incorporate music
Encourage your music students to recognize notes, beats, chants, lyrics, and songs by hanging up rhythms or snippets of songs. Students can play the snippets on a musical instrument or tap out the notes to see if they can guess the mystery song.
19. Make a mistake
Put a problem on the bulletin board that contains a mistake. Students can work the problem to see if they can find the mistake. You can also try this with lists of words, misspelling some of them and seeing if students can find them.
20. Encourage reading
Entice your students to learn more about something or someone by making flaps on your bulletin board. Write just enough on the front of the flap to interest them. Students must lift the flap to learn more.
21. Recommend new books
Provide students with rectangles that will act as book spines or book covers. As they read books they really enjoy, they can write the title on the spine or draw the cover picture. Create a bookshelf on the bulletin board so students can find their next good book based on the recommendations of their peers.
22. Do some graphing
Have students put together a bar graph by graphing the letters of their name, their favorite kind of weather, or their favorite foods. Once the graph is made, your students can interact with their peers’ responses by asking a series of questions.
23. Give your students a quiz
Hang a few clues about something you’re learning in class, such as famous people or simple machines, and then have students figure out what is being described in the clues. Not only is this a great way to reinforce concepts, but it can take the place of a traditional pencil and paper quiz.
24. Make a timeline
Create an ongoing bulletin board that starts at the beginning of a unit, such as the history of America or the addition of states to the country. As students learn new facts and dates, they can add them to the timeline. When it’s finished, the bulletin board will serve as a great way to study for a test.
25. Hold a vote
Instead of simply writing choices on a slip of paper, create a voting booth on a bulletin board. Hang a box on the board and provide students with ballots to put in the box. Give students information about their voting options by hanging pictures and facts on the bulletin board near the ballot box.
26. Get to know each other
Play a guessing game to get to know each person in the class. Have students create an image of themselves with a mask on (medical or otherwise!). Students will include a few facts about themselves. The kids can read the clues and see if they can match each person up with a friend in the class.
27. Go out to eat
Create a restaurant menu on a bulletin board so students have a fun way to practice counting and adding money. Students can select from the menu and figure out how many dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies it would take to buy those items. Do a similar activity with a toy store or hardware store instead.
28. Give them the answer
Think up a problem, but instead of giving that to students, give them the answer instead. Then students will see if they can come up with the question to go with the answer.
29. Challenge them
Give your students a series of challenges to meet. Perhaps they need to find specific answers from a book you’re reading together or several tasks to figure out the solution to a science inquiry.
30. Guess the historical figure
Hang up a picture and/or a set of clues about people you are studying in history or social studies. Students will read the clues and then use their resources to find out the identification of each person, as well as more facts about that person.
31. Identify differences
Stretch your students’ learning by seeing if they can tell the difference between two things, such as poems vs. songs or books vs. movies. Create a set of flaps. Put the clue for each item on the outside of the flap and the correct answer on the inside. Students can make their guess and then lift the flap to see if they were correct.
32. See what you can find
Practice things such as location words and prepositions by creating a scene on your bulletin board. Hang the location words and then hide something around the scene. Students will describe where the item is located using the words on the bulletin board.
33. Spread some love
Celebrate Valentine’s Day or World Kindness Day by hanging the word “love” on a bulletin board. Provide students with markers and let them fill the board with as many ways to spread love and kindness as they can think of. Other students will be inspired when they read all the ideas.
34. Find some new friends
Set up a pen pal program with your students and students from schools in around the country or around the world. The students can exchange post cards that you can hang on a bulletin board. Students can locate where the postcards come from by looking at a map. Exchanging letters also helps students practice writing and spelling.
35. Share what you learned
Choose an article and read it together as a class. Hang the article on a bulletin board and have students write down something they learned to add to the board. As students look at the board, they might just learn something they didn’t pick up on when they read the article.
36. Share thoughts and feelings
Give students blank papers to fill in their thoughts about certain topics. They can complete an inspirational sentence or share how a book made them feel. The other students can gain inspiration or learn new things from the thoughts of their peers.
37. Share goals
Ring in the new year by having students write their goals for the coming year on an interactive bulletin board. This would also be a great activity for the start of the school year. Students can write down what they want to learn over the course of the year or things they want to improve upon before summer break.
38. Let students self-monitor
Hang up some envelopes or file folders with labels allowing students to tell you how well they understand what they are studying. Students can place their work in the corresponding spot. Students who feel like they completely understand can put their work in the envelope labeled “I’ve got it!” while other students might use the envelopes saying, “I’m doing OK” or “I need more help.” This allows you to quickly gauge who needs more help from you.
39. Make a BINGO board
Hang up a grid with several different tasks, such as a writing prompt or book to read, and challenge students to fill in the board. Once students get five in a row (or a blackout!) they can receive a prize or some type of recognition for their efforts.
40. Study current events
Invite students to bring in news articles or pictures of events happening around the world. They can share what they brought and then you can add it to the bulletin board for other students to also read.
41. Plot locations from books
Hang up a giant map on a bulletin board. Give students small stickers and have them place them in the locations they read about in books. They can also hang stickers in places you learn about in social studies.
42. Ask a thought-provoking question
Write a question on a bulletin board and leave plenty of space for students to write their answers. The kids can use markers to add their thoughts and answers to the board.
The only limit to creating an interactive bulletin board is your imagination! Inviting your students to interact with what they’re learning about is a sure way to ensure that they remember that information long into the future.
