A Math bulletin board that actually gets read!

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Here are pictures of my hallway bulletin board.  It's interactive and dynamic.  It's also a little more work than most bulletin boards, which typically get installed and then forgotten until they're stale.  But after the initial printing of questions and setup, it only takes a couple of minutes of daily maintenance.

At Maloney all teachers are responsible for a hall bulletin board or display case space for two consecutive months.  My beginning-of-year bulletin board is on August/September (and then October) in History and Current Events.  I look for events that I think students in Grades 3, 4, and 5 would find interesting and write questions for them, as shown.   

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There are pencils taped to yarn which is suspended from the top of the frame, so students don't need to have a pencil with them to answer.  I monitor the board every day and award a pencil to each student who first solves a problem correctly. I replace pages as the problems are solved.

The Math is not rocket science --  this is not instruction, with a few exceptions.   Most questions are assigned to specific grades to leave easier problems for younger students. The cost of the pencils is not great -- pencils by the gross are pretty cheap.  And it's rare to have a pencil disappear.

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There are variations...the Current Events section always gets read.  Sports can be the focus for lots of questions if your students are fans.  I like wordplay and I think reading punny license plates is great reading and brain twister exercise.   And sometimes I include a page that clarifies a math process -- for instance, measurement conversions, which students often get backwards at the start of school.

I illustrate each event with one or two images that I find on the Internet, an allowable practice under the Classroom Exemption, since these are displayed only and not copied and handed out to students.