Please share with me your fabulous classroom display ideas to kick off Autumn term!

[CrowyMcCrowFace]

Slightly pathetic of me as I've been teaching nearly two decades!

However, I'm now teaching in Forn Parts &, a year in, have discovered a couple of new challenges.

1. You cannot order/buy ANYTHING. No display suppliers, no Amazon, no AllPosters, no Poundland or Wilkos. So my default lazy Autumn term options of 'start with a nice big poster of the film of whatever we're reading & gradually build up students' work around it' & then 'time a gothic Lit unit for when the Hallowe'en tat is in the shops & hang rubber skeletons everywhere' are no longer an option.

2. I need to cover blank walls more urgently than most Autumns as the schools policy is to completely strip all teaching rooms at the end of the summer term. My room is basically a large magnolia painted box.

I've invested in lots of borders & cut outs to deploy strategically through the year, but could really do with some suggestions of other interesting things I can take out with me. I'm secondary English & trying to avoid just buying endless boring conjunction posters...

Could you use twinkl for key words. I know it is for primary but it might work

Primary here, so might not be suitable - but in the past I've done:

• Angry Verbs - just printed a load of pics of Angry Birds and a catapult off and attached a verb to each one. Could maybe use more complex verbs at secondary?

• An interactive Latin prefix wall (Romans topic) where children matched prefixes to rest of word and also the definition.

I recommend the TES website. You can narrow down the search to 'displays'. I've had some great stuff from there.

Thanks - Twinkl & TES are both quite useful, but our repographics team are a bit, erm, unreliable when it comes to doing anything the right colour/size/way up. Plus SLG are a tad sniffy about downloaded display items - so yes I can & do make good use of them, but I can't get away with relying on them iyswim.

'Angry verbs' sound fab Batman, definitely nicking that. I love the prefixes idea too, but actually our kids are rather good on technical stuff like prefixes, which are drilled into them in the Junior section. It's getting them to be more imaginative in their own writing & more receptive to literature that's the real challenge - hence trying to make my teaching room a more interesting place to be!

Thanks again all, useful ideas here .

What about a display of famous first lines then? Chuck in a few they'll recognise ('Mr and Mrs Dursley of number 4 Privet Drive...' :D) with some that might pique their interest ('It was the day my grandmother exploded.')

I think famous lines sounds like a really great idea maybe with book titles as well and the odd famous book cover.

Washing line and pegs - you must be able to get some string and some pegs / clips / curtain rings etc

Give kids a piece of paper the size of a paperback and get them to write the name and author of their favorite book on one side - with illustration and on the back a simple summary.

I'm also primary so feel free to ignore... What about a setting or character description? Picture used as stimulus in the middle, their writing round the outside.

I'm secondary English. I had two displays with quotations on and basic background info and illustrations relating to the two most exciting IGCSE set texts, then as term went on the students created more interesting display work of their own to add to and replace my original displays.

Again, I had a few poems with associated art work, photos of the poets and mini-biogs, which were then replaced with students' own work.

Similar thing for A Level - comparing two set texts is the rubric (for prose). I formatted my display differently to the IGCSE ones and actually left a blank space in the middle for the "convergence" of the two set texts when the students had read and discussed them.

An interactive grammar-y thing with the lyrics of a song minus their punctuation and a Sharpie on a string for students to come in and correct it at the start / end of class (Teenage Kicks and Amarillo are both good).

A couple of "inspiring" quotations.

A couple of A4 "posters" made by me about books they might enjoy reading e.g. picture of the cover, synopsis, short extract.

A small blank wall backed with giant polka dot paper (printed by me - a bit rubbish but does the job) and a sign saying "work that is spot on", where student's exemplary work can be posted. (Other people have things like "the hall of fame").

My colleague bought a cheap paper chain and put quotations on one side and high level vocabulary on the other, then strung it across the room diagonally; it looks great.

Make a "Ms Crowy is reading (book)" template and hang it up. First homework of the year: "I am reading (book)", one display filled in the first week

Do all of your displays have to be ready for day 1? I'm a big fan of poster making competitions: display and homework sorted. yes, I am that lazy

No Amazon? Where are you teaching - even Ecuador has Amazon

Some excellent ideas there Locked Out & Acopy. Thanks, will pinch some of these, especially the paper chain - I'm trying to be a bit more '3d' than just posters etc.

I'm in Egypt. We are completely Amazon proof! & all good quality stationery is expensive. Plus the school's system for checking out display materials from the stockroom is somewhat Byzantine. It's basically like accessing your vault at Gringotts, but in Arabic. So I'm aiming to hit the ground running this year with a decent classroom that looks less like a beige box!

...& thanks other PPs too! Phone dropped me at end of thread so didn't see your posts.

Lots of useful ideas, thanks .