Goal: No Blank Walls For Open House Night

Here’s a easy-peasy activity that can contribute to your literacy-rich classroom walls, just in time for Back-To-School Night, or Open House Night, or whatever your school calls it.

The beginning of the year is all about setting goals. Make a pos

ter of your students’ reading and writing goals for the year, in their words:

Each student's Writing Goal, put into poster form. (Sorry about the photo quality, old camera phone!)

One year, I gave each student a set of bright index cards, one for reading, one for writing. (I did this THE DAY OF Open House, as it was scheduled pretty early on the calendar that year…can you say ‘yikes!’?) They wrote their own goals, and with no editing from me. Then, I pasted them onto butcher paper, added a title, cut out the paper, and luckily, the laminator was working that day. Viola! Instant, RELEVANT, student-created work on your walls. These were 5th graders, so they wrote (some were brainstormed/prompted) things like, “Add details”, “Write for longer times” and “Learn new words”. Here’s our Reading Goals:

Our Reading Goals

This turned out to be a quick and easy way to get student work on the walls pronto. You could do something similar in any grade, on butcher paper, chart paper, or mini-posters. Even just the index cards would work. Bonus: We referred to the posters several times over the course of the fall, so they became part of a true literacy-rich environment. At the end of the year, I brought the posters out to help reflect on the year and how much they we grown as readers and writers.

How will you turn your bare walls into a literacy-rich environment at the beginning of the year?