Incorporating Educational Posters with Classroom Curriculum Projects

One of the most efficient ways to exhibit, and reinforce classroom curriculum, is through the visual aide of educational posters. These focused educational aides are not only easy-to-make and recycle, but durable enough to rotate year-after-year. These eye-catching, educational exhibits can be presented, as hands-on curriculum-themed projects for your students, and then prominently displayed in your classroom for thematic presentations.

Inexpensive Supplies

Large colorful poster boards can be purchased, for under a dollar, from most office supply stores, craft stores, and many larger grocery chain stores (stationery or school-supply aisles), for lightweight, cardboard wall posters, or cut and fold, for free-standing table-card displays.

Photographs, magazines, and newspaper pictures can be cut up, and then added, to spotlight and simplify difficult concepts, through relevant photo images.

Charts, graphs, maps, and relatable, kid-friendly images can be printed out, directly from the internet, to substantiate thematic data-at-a-glance.

Inexpensive packages of colorful construction or computer papers add instant framing, and depth-of-dimension to important photos, documents, illustrations, graphs, charts, etc.

Glue sticks or clear glue-adhesive dots will hold everything in place on the poster board.

A roll of clear, wide packing tape allows a wide variety of specimens to be permanently encased; such as bugs, leaves, soil samples, fingerprints, or tiny shells, and then mounted onto display boards for full viewing. See the Martha Stewart example, of this scrapbooking technique online here http://www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/scrapbook-ideas-and-albums#slide_3 .

Constructing the Posters

If you're familiar with scrapbooking, you'll find assembling classroom posters to be very similar to scrapbooking techniques, but on a larger scale. Simple layouts require illustrative picture placements, onto solid sheets of construction or computer papers (for added spotlighting), leaving blank spaces for informational text and labeling, and then gluing down, onto poster boards.

Integrating Posters within Curriculum

Educational posters can be integrated into any curriculum theme, as a creative-discovery application. Allow teams of students to design their own posters, highlighting assigned curriculum points you'd like to reinforce, or specific areas of focus for subject-matter retention.

Ask students to bring pictures, graphs, charts, cartoons, or other curriculum-related items from home, to be used on individual, or team posters. Poster boards can also be cut in half, or quartered, to allow for smaller, individual student posters, which could then be combined onto a larger, team-poster board.

Either individual, or team poster, construction will reinforce your students' knowledge, by enabling them to physically handle, and mold-into-shape, the knowledge you've imparted to them. You will find your students retain more information, and test better, by incorporating educational posters into the curriculum.