Inspiring students within the classroom can be a tough job sometimes.
Inspiring students within the classroom can be a tough job sometimes.
Whether it’s Monday morning after an exciting weekend, or the end of a long week, kids can be hard to control and even harder to motivate to learn. Keeping students focused takes practice and skill, and keeping morale up is another essential factor in ensuring they stay on track over the weeks they are part of your class.
One way you can do this is through motivational phrases and posters used to decorate your classroom. These contract reminders or positivity and growth mindsets can keep students focused and remind them why they are there. To make sure your students are committed to learning every day, read on for some of the classroom quotes you could use or be inspired by and how these can be used in the classroom.
Incorporating classroom quotes into your lessons and your teaching environment is key. Simply finding quotes or sticking them to the wall will not achieve the full potential that they hold. To really make students pay attention to these phrases, you can try including them in lessons to encourage the children to take note of and remember them.
One way to do this is by using lesson time to allow children to choose a phrase or make up their motivational phrase and turn it into a poster. This could be during an art lesson or another subject you could link. Allow children to run wild with materials from felt tips and pencils to glitter, glue, and scissors. The more creative you allow students to be, the more likely they are to remember and take heed of the messages they are creating.
Further, making these much more personalized and inventive posters into a display will prompt them to notice and look at the quotes more often. Encouraging them to pay more attention to your carefully picked quotes is a good idea, as it is only then that they will benefit from the encouraging phrases.
If you don’t have the class time or the resources for children to create their posters, it is still helpful to have these motivational phrases around. You can find a lot of printable posters online. Otherwise, you can buy pre-printed posters or even design your own if there are specific quotes you want.
Suppose children are not part of the creation process. In that case, you could instead draw attention to the posters occasionally, perhaps even choosing one or two to focus on as class mottos to improve motivation and effort in the classroom. You could also try asking the children for a class motto or motivational phrase ideas to turn into posters yourself or set the task as homework if you don’t have time to let the children make their own in school.
Displays are a great way to keep students learning, even if they get distracted, and their focus wanders to the walls. A motivational display can ensure they stay focused and on task since there is a constant reminder of all they are gaining. These can liven up your classroom and create a more comfortable environment for students while promoting a focus on learning. So, if you are looking for valuable and productive things to do with the four walls of your classroom, here are some great display ideas to keep your students loving learning!
The best kind of display can be more than viewed – it can be interacted with. Adding clipboards is a great way to make sure any necessary information or sheets are readily available to students. However, you can only do this if your learners are old enough to remove sheets from the clipboard without the others ending up all over the floor! Using pegs is another brilliant way to highlight work or essential information. Include a simple peg line using any thread or yarn to hand, and use the pegs to clip examples of work or display items creatively and visually excitingly.
It is easy to fall into the trap of creating displays with bland backgrounds. Instead, why not try using cheap wrapping paper to create a more eye-catching background to present work and information on?
Another way to make your display boards and spare space interactive is by adding the opportunity to add sticky notes to the display. Encouraging students to add their thoughts and ideas to the display is a way to get them more interested in coming up with their own opinions and additions and get them more engaged with the display you are creating. This is a simple way to ensure everybody feels like they have contributed and create a complete and fun-looking display.
Making your display pop can be difficult, but photo frames are a brilliant way to draw attention to especially important information or highly praised work. You could select some of the top work or most improved students and highlight their work within some lightweight picture frames. Otherwise, if there is any information you need to highlight, frame it! This is sure to catch your learner’s attention and is fairly easy to do with no more than some sticky tape of command strips.
If 3D is something that you want in your display, you will love this new and creative idea. Getting your students involved in using shoe boxes to create hanging display boxes is a brilliant and innovative way to display information. These boxes can be stuck to display walls or even hung from the ceiling, creating extra display space for you – great if you are short on wall space! Students can use what they have learned to add pictures and pieces of information in these 3D boxes, allowing them to consolidate their learning simultaneously, encourage creativity, and build a great display!
For complicated topics or those made up of many different components, you could try using wool, ribbon, or string to visually connect different parts of the topic. Using visuals to demonstrate how different ideas are linked is a great way to help visual learners. It can be helpful for others, too, to see the information presented in a new layout as it forces the students to understand the information in a new way.
Anything from folders, envelopes, or even homemade paper pockets is an excellent addition to displays, as they can be visually and physically useful. Use these spaces to put copies of important information, newsletters, task cards, prompts, or checklists to which all students need easy access. This saves time on having to hand out essential resources and ensures that each learner has everything they need readily available. These pockets can also be incorporated into displays in a way that helps to explain how the resources are helpful and how they should be used to maximize the students learning.
If you are struggling to find time around your busy schedule or don’t know how to create an engaging display out of a certain topic, you can find companies or sites that will custom-make you a display. These displays can fit any space or other requirements and can be printed entirely or as backgrounds to which you can add images, lists, certificates, or other items. These backgrounds are great for things that are likely to change or revolve, like a student council, weekly certificate or prize winners, or attendance records.
Motivational displays and quotes found around the classroom can do wonders for a class. They may start to blend in eventually and lose their effect, and at this point, it could be a good idea to rotate and replace your displays. If you have allowed the students to make their own, a great way to do this is to allow them to take their creations home at the end of the year or when you want to change the display so that they can keep their motivational poster and remember to stay positive even when they are at home.