The Wall Work Series

Before you all think I am one of these:

I just thought I would add a general blog disclaimer.  There is a rule (don't worry I checked) that you can bring items you create for your classroom with you wherever you go.  They do this because they know that every teacher has their own style and will most likely want to do his or her own thing.  So they figure since you will use it you should bring it.  And so I did.  The only exception is if you create something for a specific child.  In this case you have to leave it or create a second one to bring with you.  I did that as well, as you saw in the last post.  Good, Glad we cleared that up!

So I thought I would post a little series spotlighting something I created during my first year of teaching.  I had a lot of fun making these items and my students loved using them.  They also were able to work on some great skills and learn some independence and generalization. It was called wall work.  I had 6-7 posters hanging on the walls, each one had a different activity to complete.  Every week (for a couple months) we would have  an official wall work time.  During this time the students would be able to choose 1 poster from the wall and work on it.  My staff and I would help, occasionally I would use this time to pull the students 1:1 to work on assessments or lessons,  but I really enjoyed watching my students enjoy them and become more independent over time. Boardmaker was again used to create these projects.

For Teachers: Heres how I displayed and worked the whole system.  I made sure to create items that were goals for my students but that they could eventually learned to complete with minimal assistance, maybe 2/3 students per adult. 

So I had these poster hanging with velcro on the walls.  Underneath each one was a little tab of laminated squares with colors that corresponded to the color of the poster.

Each student had one of these little strips and as soon as they finished a poster they would grab the corresponding sqaure and put it on their strip as they put the poster back on the wall.

I will post all of my individual posters on subsequent posts, starting today but feel free to use what works best for you and your children or students.

This is a beginning sounds poster.  I have a bunch of pictures that start with E-H and have the corresponding words on the pictures.  The students start with all the pictures at the bottom and then sort them by beginning sound/letter.

The nice thing about having both the picture and the word was that if a student wasn't quite ready to figure out on their own what the sound was they could match the letter itself which took some detective skills and problem solving.  If the student did know how to do it without looking at the word they would usually work with an adult who would cover up the word and then they would check them all after they were placed where they went! 

We had tons of fun!

For Moms:  I plan on creating smaller versions of these to put in an activity book for my little guy when he gets older.  They would be fun for car trips or quiet books-although velcro isn't always so quiet.  These and more to follow are great skills that all little ones need eventually!

I consider most of these skills Level 2 skills meaning there is information that has to be mastered before these can be completed independently but you can create these for anything, simple color sorting, shapes, letters etc.!!

There are 6 more parts of my wall work series to come!

So stick around!

Enjoy!

As always I love to hear if you have done something similar or made this after seeing this post!