Bulletin Boards

One of my responsibilities at my new job is to decorate the children's area. Spruce it up; make it special. One easy way to to that on on the two large bulletin boards in the hall that leads from the children's area to our meeting/programming room.

I have a few opinions about what makes a good bulletin board in the library. It should be fun. It should capture your attention. Color is a must. But I also really think that it should have something to do with the library itself. Somehow these spaces should promote what the library has to offer - a part of the collection, programs, or even reading/literacy as a whole. After all, I didn't get my MLS so that I could work as an interior decorator, so any decorating that I do is going to (generally) accomplish something.

Here's my first board, the larger of the two:


To help get geared up for fall I decided to do something seasonal. I immediately thought of trees and colorful leaves. The tree is pieced together from about 20 pieces of brown construction paper. I pinned the paper up to the board and then used a box cutter to trim the paper to the shape I wanted. Turned out pretty good if I do say so myself! The smaller leaves which fill in the space were left over from a past display and were done on a die-cut machine. For the larger leaves, the acorns, and the squirrels I actually found a box full of large outlined images (aprox. 9"x6") that seemed designed to be copied and used for classroom activities. I made photocopies of the shapes on colored paper, cut them out, and pinned them up.

This season also lends itself to a delightfully cheesy catch phrase: "Fall into a good book." I had hoped to actually print off cover art of several different books to put onto the falling leaves to go with this theme and promote these titles, but unfortunately the library does not have a color printer! Black and white images would not do. Perhaps in the coming days I'll make color copies of actual book jackets shrunk down to the appropriate size to suit this purpose.

Here is my second bulletin board:


This board is definitely more geared for parents, featuring descriptions of the six early literacy skills that experts believe that children need to master before they can become good readers (more on this later). Each sheet describes one skill and tells parents ways that they can help to encourage this skill at home. The building blocks along the bottom are there for visual interest and support the idea that these skills are, "the building blocks of reading." I like to talk about these skills during storytime whenever possible and having this information posted for parents to explore on their own - especially so near the room where storytime takes place - can only help to promote these ideas.

Another bonus - because this board isn't seasonal, I can leave it up as long as I need to!