Sometimes it is helpful to zoom out and look at the entire school year for planning purposes. Here is a collection of resources/blog posts with the whole school year in mind:
Check out the Contents page for a list of all my blog posts, organized by category.
For context, I teach first- and second-year orchestra students at two elementary schools.
I keep a document where I keep track which years/months I post my different hallway bulletin boards, and I thought it might be helpful to see them sorted by month. My beginning-of-the-year bulletin board tends to stay up until winter break if it's a year when I don't put up the bow hold bulletin board; then second semester I'll change it each month or so. Some I use every year (Birthday/Music for Life/Music In Our Schools Month/End-of-Year Recruiting), some I alternate every-other year (the two January bulletin boards), some I try to rotate between several before repeating one (beginning-of-the-year bulletin boards), and some I've maybe only used once or twice.
What other bulletin board ideas might I add to the mix?
SEPTEMBER/BEGINNING OF THE YEAR/SEMESTER 1
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER/WINTER CONCERT
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY/JUNE/END OF YEAR
ANY TIME (or could be timed to special events--Career Day?)
YEAR-ROUND (in classroom)
For this year's beginning-of-the-year bulletin board, I wanted to label the different parts of notes and eventually came up with the title "Take note: We are all PART of what makes our school community shine!" It's a little wordy, but I liked that it included both "note" and "part." You could insert your school name in place of "our school community" too. This bulletin board can also double as a year-round reference, simply titled "Parts of a Note."
Parts labeled:
I used the pictures of the different rhythms from this blog post and rearranged them for each note part (see links to printouts below). I did use a black Sharpie to round out a couple places that looked a little cut off. For the large version, I printed as-is, then cut a half-inch off each side to be able to use an 8 1/2 by 11" background. For the smaller version, I set the print settings to 2 pages per sheet and then cut each to 3 1/4 by 4 1/2". The colored background was a half-sheet of paper, 4 1/4 by 5 1/2, with a bigger black background behind that, again cut to make a half-inch border.
For the large pair of eighth notes, I didn't trust my free-hand drawing skills, so I greatly enlarged an image of an outline of eighth notes, printed/cut/traced onto black paper and then cut/attached the pieces. I used a Cricut for the text (Fontastic Fonts, DJ Smooth) and arrows, but created a Google doc with everything here to print out.
Feel free to use!
.jpg)
In an effort to help with retention in orchestra between elementary and middle school, I created this "Music for Life" bulletin board. I was hearing from students saying that they wanted to become engineers or something else that wasn't directly music-related, so they weren't sure there was room for music classes in their middle school schedules. I want students to be able to visualize themselves as musicians--no matter what they may end up studying in college or choosing as a career--and to understand that music classes are for everyone--not just those who are planning to become professional musicians. This bulletin board showcases highly accomplished individuals who didn't necessarily go into music as a career but still had musical backgrounds (or sometimes musicians who also studied other disciplines).
The text on the bulletin board says:
Music for life! You don’t have to become a professional musician to enjoy playing music—music is part of a well-rounded education and is for everyone! Music is something you can take with you for the rest of your life :)
Check out these individuals who are well-known in their own fields and are also musicians—or are famous musicians who studied other disciplines too!
Here are the 15 individuals included (feel free to add your own):
For this year's beginning-of-the-year bulletin board, I wanted to do something with conducting patterns. I came up with the title "Lead The Way to a Year of Learning!" I also thought about doing "Lead the Way to a ____ Year" with lots of different adjectives in different fonts and colors, but then I thought that would look too busy. In addition to the conducting patterns and time signatures, I included pictures of a diverse set of composers.
I went over the time signatures and conducting patterns with a permanent marker to make them less pixel-y.
Featured conductors include:
My district is planning an in-person return in September. I'm nervous about this decision, but one small thing I knew I had in my control was the message in my back-to-school bulletin board. Here's hoping this is the only year I'll have to use this one!
I found a website that lets you resize a picture of a mask to a photo that you upload, so I tried to add a variety of string players and composers.
