Walls that Teach

A little while ago I listened to an episode from one of my favourite podcasts- ‘Teacher Takeaway’ podcast- about ‘walls that teach’. It really cemented for me the importance of having interactive walls in my classroom, where students feel confident to walk around the room and use tools that will enhance their learning- the walls being the 3^rd teacher! 

Although the biggest take-away I took from this episode, were the three C’s- co-created, co-developed and co-designed.

When we started Wholehearted, our reasoning was mainly because we couldn’t find resources that helped to create a calm, and not overwhelming classroom environment. We believe that too many colours, posters and things on the wall can be distracting for some students’ learning. We started to make resources that would help teachers to create a student-focused and meaningful classroom, with class displays and hands on activities.

In this blog post I want to share how I use WH resources to ignite student thinking and get them to co-create, co-develop and co-design things for our classroom.

I am currently in a Learning Support role where I am working with years 3-6 students on Writing. Most of these examples are related to my current Writing program and lessons.

I have a working Word Wall where students add words themselves based on the type of text or specific language features we are focusing on and words they think they will need in their writing. Last term we were looking at persuasive texts, so the students placed lots of modality words on our word wall. I have now taken these down, as this term we are focusing on Imaginative texts.

 

I have these Sentence Type Posters at eye level on the wall, as sentence structure is a huge focus in my groups. We are working on writing simple, compound and complex sentences to make up a larger text. I am constantly referring to these example posters, but the students are also constantly creating their own examples to refer to on the wall. We use our Parts of Speech Discs to identify various parts of speech in a sentence and to help determine whether a sentence is simple, compound or complex. We also use these discs a lot when co-creating texts on the teacher whiteboard.

        

 Adjectives

As part of a lesson on adjectives, I asked students to use a thesaurus to create lists of ‘better words’ to use instead of simple adjectives. I got the students to work in pairs and create these Adjective posters to display on our walls and they also added some of these words to our word wall. This lesson was the inspiration for the creating our Adjective Choice Posters.

Although sometimes our classroom may look Pinterest-perfect, it does function as an interactive 3^rd teacher where students are participating actively in their own learning.