A really important aspect of making your classroom feel comfortable and welcoming is getting the bulletin board decorations right. You want your bulletin boards to have a sense of personality and a sense of community.
You want the bulletin boards to reflect the subjects that you are covering in class – and you also want them to reflect the attitudes and personalities of the students in your class.
Here, we are not trying to command what you should and should not do – we are just here as a form of inspiration and as a general guide for what you can do with your classroom bulletin boards.
So, without further ado, let’s get started on how you can inject some fun and personality into your classroom decor.
How Often Should You Change Your Classroom Bulletin Boards?
This is something that is totally up to you, and it also depends on how much time you have. You don’t want to add too much work and pressure on yourself to keep constantly changing the bulletin boards.
In fact, there is no need to constantly change all of the bulletin boards.
You could just have a couple of boards that you change up more frequently – there could be some bulletin boards that stay the same in your classroom because they might be better suited to the work that your class is doing throughout the whole year.
There is no rule as to how often you should change up your bulletin boards. You can just decide on a system that works best for you.
The whole purpose of the bulletin board is to reflect the vibe that you want to feel in your classroom.
Naturally, the bulletin boards will reflect your personality as a teacher, and they should also reflect your classroom. They will also need to be age-appropriate for your students and influenced by their likes.
Keeping Your Bulletin Boards In With The Season
The best way to go about decorating your May bulletin board is to keep in with the season, so you are going to want your bulletin board to be super bright and super colorful, and a whole lotta fun.
This is a key way of marking the month of May. You want your students to feel excited when they look at the bulletin board, and this is a great way of marking the transition from spring into summer.
This can be a great way of getting your class excited for summer break, and they will be much more motivated to work super hard in the build-up to summer.
How Can You Get Your Students Involved?
So, the month of May is the springtime and is edging into the summer months. So, with this in mind, you can really get your class involved by getting them to make decorations that reflect the month.
For example, you can get your class to make handprint flowers. This is something that is super easy and fun to do.
You can get super fun and super creative with this, using all sorts of glitter, and when the paint is dry, make sure to get your students to personalize their handprint flowers with their names or initials or drawings on the flowers.
This can be a memento that they take home with them at the end of the year.
Theme Idea: Nature Blossoming In Springtime
A really popular bulletin board idea for May time is to incorporate the weather – and with the nicer weather comes the fun creatures that come out of winter hiding.
So, the best way that you can get your class involved in this process is by getting them to create their own insects to put on the board. These could be butterflies, caterpillars, or dragonflies.
Alternatively, you might prefer to appreciate the other, less creepy-crawly animals that come out in the springtime – which of course your students can get involved in too.
You can get your students to create birds if you have more of a sky scene going on, or if you have a pond or lake scene going on, they can make frogs to sit on lily pads in the pond!
Theme Idea: Moving From The Spring Into The Summer
A great bulletin board idea for May is to celebrate the month for being a transitional period between the spring and the summer months.
So, you can use your classroom bulletin board as a way of celebrating and paying homage to this. You can do this by incorporating typical spring imagery into your bulletin boards.
One example of this is growing flowers. This could be themed in a garden setting or it could be themed in a field setting.
If you are going for the garden theme then you can have plant pots, and gardening tools such as a watering can and a shovel.
Of course, you can naturally incorporate sunshine as part of this bulletin board – that is of course the trademark of spring turning into summer. The sun should be out!
Another image that can remind people of spring is washing on a clothes line.
This is a key image of spring that your students will recognize and be totally familiar with, meaning it’s something that you can personalize to your students in the classroom.
You can get the students to decorate t-shirts on the washing line, and they can write their name and use stickers and glitter to make them more personal to them.
This is something that will definitely lift the moods of the students in your class – and this is especially important because you will want your class to be inspired and to be as positive as possible.
The best way of decorating this bulletin board is by including elements that your class will associate with the beach. So, this would naturally be a bucket and a spade, or a surfboard, or maybe even an ice lolly.
You could get your class to write descriptive writing on the beach depending on how old they are, and the beach scene could then turn into a message in a bottle scene.
Alternatively, you can opt for an under the sea sort of beach theme, and you can have your class make their own under the sea creatures like different colored fish, jellyfish, sharks, or turtles. Whatever they would like!
Again, we recommend getting your class to try to personalize their creation somehow, as it will inspire them to take pride in their work and get more invested in the task.
If you are enjoying the beach theme and want to create something a little bit different, then you could get your class to make different types of boats that you would find in the sea – this could be a big cruise ship, or they could make sailboats or kayaks.
This could even be some kind of progress chart – you could make a start and end point on the bulletin board, and then when the students achieve something they can then move the boat along.
This is perfect if you are keen to change up your bulletin board but you don’t want to have to do it all the time.
It is also important to mention that keeping your bulletin board themed in a much broader sense can be helpful if you are only looking to change your classroom bulletin boards on a seasonal basis rather than on a monthly basis.
If you opt for the tropical island theme, you will find that this can last pretty much all year round – you could even make the board pirate themed.
This would be especially fitting if you are planning on completing work that is related to pirates or if you are reading a book in class that incorporates pirates.
There are lots of different ways that you can incorporate the tropical island theme into your classroom – and a great way to get your class involved would be to get them to make handprints out of paint.
These should be green so that you can then fashion them into palm tree leaves.
In Conclusion
Overall, there are a whole lot of different ideas out there which can give you inspiration for your own May bulletin board.
You will want your bulletin board to have a positive impact on your classroom, and you will ultimately want something that will motivate and inspire your students.
It is totally up to you how often you change up your bulletin boards, but if you are looking to opt for a monthly theme, inspiration can run a little short, which is totally understandable because you have a lot of months to think about.
However, we think that orientating your bulletin board around the theme of the changing seasons can work really well – and this can be a great way to involve students if this is something that you are especially keen to do.
Hi, my name is Helena Waters and I was a teacher for 40 years before retiring last year.
During my time as a teacher I dedicated the majority of it to making classrooms as fun as possible, with educational parties, fun activities, and low cost entertainment that made the children excited about learning.
I taught children of all ages, from preschoolers to high school students. Now, with the pandemic having uprooted everything that children once knew about school and learning, I think that the need for my ideas is bigger than ever.
That is why I created School Sparks, a place in which I can write down and share all of my ideas on how to get students excited about going to school again. I hope that you’ll find some useful within a school setting, even at home too!
