My Favorite Bulletin Board of All Time!

So, here it is!  My favorite bulletin board of all time!  My kindergarteners and I have been creating it annually for at least eight years now.  I have fun preparing it, the students love making additions to it and watching it change each month, and I've received SO many compliments from staff and parents.  

Take a closer look:

And now look at a couple of the monthly variations:

Here is October's pumpkin patch.

And here is May's flower garden.

It all starts with a photo of each child that I take during the first weeks of school.

Next, I read a favorite book,  The Colors of Us,  by Karen Katz, and the children choose the construction paper they want for their skin color.

I sit down at home with each child's photo and some construction paper and a pair of scissors and--voila!

Then, at school, I teach the class how to draw all the important details of their faces, one feature at a time:  eyes, pupils, irises, the whites of our eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, an l or j shaped nose, and a smile.  I share one exciting fact about each facial feature: for example, our pupils are actually holes that let the light come in!  In order to stop certain students from racing ahead and scribbling over their face, I have a little song that I sing to the tune of "Hold your finger in the air"  between steps:

"Hold your crayon in the air, in the air.

Hold your crayon in the air, in the air,

Hold your crayon in the air,

And hold it awhile up there,

Hold your crayon in the air, in the air."

You can get surprisingly good results from kindergarteners if you go slowly.

I usually keep the bulletin board in the class the first month and then move it to a hallway bulletin board above our lockers.  I want the kindergarteners to take ownership of it so that when it moves outside the classroom, they have a desire to look up to see it.

Here are the projects we do each month:

August:  creating our Kindergarten Kids and their faces

September:  torn paper apples 

October:  free form pumpkins of various sizes with vines attached

November:  turkeys

December and January:  winter caps

February:  red or pink hearts with "I Love You" and  crumpled bits of white tissue paper around the border

March:  black pots with bits of gold foil, paper, glitter, candy wrappers inside

April:  umbrellas made with half of a paper plate painted with watercolors and black chenille handles

May:  flowers--this is the one project I definitely request parents to work on with their child at home since we get the most lovely, varied garden