Using Interactive Bulletin Boards in Your IB PYP Classroom

I am so excited about this new tool for IB PYP classrooms! The interactive bulletin board offers so much and can quite literally become the learning hub for many of the approaches to learning skills, the unit of inquiry or a specific curricular area, all centred around the Learner Profile. It promotes international mindedness, communication skills & accountable talk, builds the attitudes of independence, tolerance and  confidence, to name a few, and encourages student agency in our classroom. This tool does it all!

Form : What does it look like?

The Learner Profile, being the centre of the IB PYP, is also the central part of this interactive bulletin board display. The  posters  with the Learner Profile descriptors are actually pockets. They are cute and colourful, with the usual kid-friendly description of what it means to be a learner through each trait.

These pockets can be stapled or pinned to your board at a kid friendly height. This is very important, since the children have to be able to have free access to each of the pockets. If you need to add a small stepping stool, do so.

There are tickets for each of the Learner Profile attributes. These tickets currently cover COMMUNICATION skills and LITERACY skills. There are 10 tickets focusing on communication skills for each profile trait and 5 for literacy, making a total to date of 150 tickets.  That is enough to keep conversations and thinking flowing for every day of the school year!

The best part about this whole resource is that it is a GROWING BUNDLE! Yep, once you own it, you will have free access to the additional tickets as they are added to the bundle! I will be adding tickets for each of the Approaches to Learning Skills as well as maths, key concepts and eventually the Transdisciplinary themes too. They will ALL be tied in with the Learner Profile, thus really building upon what it means to be a Learner from a variety of different angles.

 Function: How Is It Interactive?

Once you have set up your bulletin board display with the pockets, you will decide which skill to focus upon. Will you use the communication skills tickets first? Or would you rather the literacy tickets? Once decided, you will then copy and cut the tickets and insert them into the correlating pockets. I like to laminate the sheets before I cut them. It makes the tickets hardier for longer. Remember that lots of little hands will be handling them daily. I like to model to the children how it all works at the beginning of the school year. It ties in wonderfully with that beginning of the year review of the Learner Profile.

Now, the fun begins! Suggestions for Interacting:

Morning Meetings or End of the Day Pow Wow:  Gathering the children together on the rug at the beginning or the very end of the day is a common practice that brings us together as a community. The interactive bulletin board is perfect for this! We gather around the board and, using the communication tickets, I have the children walk to the board and choose a profile trait of their choice. Or, if we are specifically focusing on only one or two Learner Profile traits, then the children shall pull tickets from those pockets. They then read it aloud. Questions range from higher level provocations to more personal reflective experiences.

“Open-Minded – How do you think being open minded is useful to society today and in the future? “

“Caring – Think about a time when someone was caring to you. Describe what happened and how it made you feel.”

These questions are great conversation starters, they develop the children’s communication skills and they allow us to come together for meaningful & reflective discussions.

Small Group Discussions or Partner Work: You can choose to focus on one profile trait or give the children free reign to choose for themselves. If they pick for themselves, I like to give them the added challenge of explaining why they selected that trait. Is it something they want to work on or is it a trait that they feel confident with already? Keep them reflecting and thinking about themselves and their learning goals at all times. The children will then take the ticket or tickets to their quiet spot and read the questions aloud to each other. Sharing their own thoughts and opinions with one another in the group helps those speaking and listening skills to develop too.

Writing Reflections: The tickets can act as a writing prompt when reflecting upon ourselves as learners. Which trait shall you pick for your reflection? The children can simply walk up to the board and select one of the communication skills tickets, take it back to their seat and write their response as a reflective exercise. Great to use at the end of a lesson or a unit of inquiry, incorporating them into working binders and portfolios.

Literacy Skills: The literacy skills tickets are fantastic to use for centres or independent work. They can be used as discussion prompts, for written responses to any text and as a review for both fiction and non fiction books and articles. I have used these in guided reading groups too.

Self Management Skills: The fact that the children are given so much free choice with the tickets enables their self management skills to be encouraged. There are also questions under the communication skills tickets that focus specifically on self management and encourage the children to think along those lines. Example:

“Communicator – If you disagree with someone else’s ideas, how could you best tell them?”

“Principled – If someone accuses you of stealing their pencil and you know you didn’t, what would you do?”

A Sneak Peek of What’s Coming 

Integrating Maths : Once the maths questions are added to the bundle you will be able to add the activity of selecting a ticket from your interactive bulletin board as a centre, as a refection activity and of course, the all important number talk, where the children are encouraged to chat about the maths concepts that they have learned with one another, thus developing cognitive thinking, accountable talk and communicating different mathematical strategies. 

Key Concepts: These shall be questions that relate to both the Learner Profile through the key concepts, thus developing a stronger knowledge of both, encouraging the children’s thought process to look through the lens of the key concept. These will be able to be used throughout the units of inquiry and a great way to prepare for the PYP Exhibition.

With so much potential for bringing self efficacy to the children and their learning, the interactive bulletin board has endless possibilities for use.

You can link directly to my store here and take a look for yourself.

I hope you’re as excited about this as I am. Please do share you thoughts and ideas too. I’m always open to new ideas!

Enjoy!