November Bulletin Board Ideas

We are Thankful for...
Trace student handprints and cut out.Paste onto the top area of a horizontal piece of construction paper.Underneath the hands have students write or draw their responses.
November is National Children's Book Month; Have students illustrate their favorite book by making a comic strip of the main events of the story.

I made a cute BB for my son's class. I took pictures of each child and the teacher, printed them out and laminated them onto cut out turkeys. As the header I used "Tony's Turkeys". The parents love it. I made sure that I used a BIG Turkey for the teacher with all the little turkeys around him. I did check with the principal and the teacher to see if I could call the kids turkeys and also to see if I could use his first name. Hope that helps. I also cut out big turkeys and they are going to write stories on how to cook a turkey.

I have one that comes out looking awesome, but is kind of a pain to do...

I have a coloring page of a cornucopia (I'm sure you could print one off a website) and I give each kid a copy of the page and a transparency to put over it. (You have to tape or paper clip the transparency to the coloring page.) Then you let them color the page with different colored Sharpies (or any permanent marker I guess). Now here's the annoying part -- after they color the picture, you take away the coloring page from behind the transparency and the black lines of the coloring page are no longer there. So last year I traced all 20 coloring pages onto the transparency around what they had colored in, using a black Sharpie. This took approximately forever!

(This year I am going to try to run the transparencies through a copier, so that the picture of the cornucopia is actually on the transparency and they can just color it in, but I'm not sure it will work. Has anyone ever tried this?)

Anyway, once u have the transparency colored it, you take a piece of aluminum foil the size of the transparency, crumple it up, then (carefully!) uncrumple it and put it behind the transparency. So now you basically have a piece of tin foil with a transparency that they colored on in front of it.

Then you take a 12 x 18 piece of construction paper (I think that's the size...you know what I mean, the big construction paper) and use it to make a frame. (Basically you cut an 8.5 x 11 hole in the middle so the transparency/tin foil will be framed by the construction paper)

Does that make any sense to anyone? It really looks awesome when its finished - I wish I could show you!

Take paperplates and cut out the middle. Cut squares of tissue paper (fall colors). Have the kids glue the squares around the paper plate. Glue on a string to hang and some raffi in a bow. Tada! A fall wreath.

I have made a wreath where you cut out the center of the paper plate then glue paper leaves (the kids trace stencils onto construction paper) around the plate. They write something they are thankful for on each leaf.

I send home a Turkey with a note attached to it and the student and family have to decorate the Turkey in some way. Not just by coloring. We hang up in the halls for conferences and they turn out really cute.

You can use this for any season... right now, we did it with leaves.

Find a simple clip art picture of the object you want. I've attached the leaf one that I used for this one. For winter we do really cute mittens. Paste the clipart to Word, and blow it up big. Then cut out one copy of it and glue it on black paper. Copy on the black paper. So what you'll have is a white object framed all in black.

(Note: The one I'm attaching is done for you b/c I did it in Paint so that the black is already on the page)

Copy enough for your kids. Have them decorate the object and the white frame around it if you've allowed for a frame with MARKER. Has to be marker.

Then they paint baby oil on any white parts. (try to keep it off the black-- you can see in the photo the one that has the baby oil on the black) They wipe it off with paper towels.

When it dries, you'll have stained glass! It is SOOOOO pretty... the light seeps right through all the colored parts. I hang mine all touching each other and it looks like one big stained glass window.

Here's a picture... ignore the rest of the mess- you can see them up on the window in a line.

Here are the leaves they used for this season.

I just did this bulletin board in my class, and it worked turned out really well. I cut out a tree from brown paper that covered the entire board. For the boarder I used fakes leaves bought from the dollar store- stapled here and there. I then found a poem about fall and posted it on the board. I had my students draw pictures and write what they think when they hear the word "fall." I then stapled the poems around the tree in collage-type way. The display turned out very nicely, and is on display in the hallway of our school.