April Bulletin Board Ideas for Math Education Month

April bulletin boards often abound with flowers, bunnies and colorful eggs. In addition to being the first full month of spring and often the home to Easter, April is also Math Education Month. Sometimes referred to as Math Awareness Month, April is the perfect time to show off math skills on April bulletin boards and highlight the importance of math to students.

For the youngest elementary grades, you could easily combined spring crafts and artwork with a math bulletin board.

"High Fives to Our Class for Counting by Fives"

Learning to count by fives? How about rows of five flowers each in a flower garden created by students that will brighten the room and can be used to review counting by fives each day?

"A Tisket, a Tasket. Fractions in a Basket"

Working on simple fractions? How about baskets labeled with ½, 1/3, ¼, and so on with eggs divided into and colored to illustrate fractions?

"Fun Fact Families"

Working on fact families? Illustrate a math fact family like 2, 3 and 5 with a basket featuring the number 5 and two eggs of one color and 3 eggs of another. Children could also copy the complete fact family onto the basket as in:

5-2=3

5-3=2

3+2=5

2+3=5

All of these examples offer opportunities to combine spring art and math skills and to create an April bulletin board that shows off the math you're learning with a built in math review board as a bonus.

As students get older "Why do I need to know this?" becomes a more and more common question during math class. For older elementary school students you may want to use Math Education Month as an inspiration for helping kids explore why they really do need math in the real world.

"Math on the Job"

Have each student interview an adult about how they use math in the work place. They should come back with the name of an occupation and a written paragraph about how math is used in this career.

Students may learn that cooking teachers multiply and divide recipes all day long and that salesmen have to multiply miles to calculate delivery prices. One of my former students was convinced that if she interviewed a hairdresser she could get away math free. She was surprised to learn that the hairdresser also collected rent for station rentals, purchased supplies and calculated mark up percentages for retail and submitted quarterly self-employment tax estimates.

Students could use photographs, magazine cut outs, sketches or computer printables to illustrate the various occupations connected to their math on the job paragraphs.

"Math Doesn't End with School"

Alternatively students could think about how they use math in their own lives outside of school or interview others on how they use math everyday. Students should again write a papagraph about everyday math and illustrate it for the math bulletin board.

Students will be using writing skills while they focus on the importance of math skills for Math Education Month. This is an April bulletin board for the elementary classroom that has both an important process and product too.