Bulletin Board Ideas for the Music Room

There are two kinds of teachers: those with Pinterest boards and those without. Why didn’t our college professors include a unit on classroom décor in our undergraduate music education classes? I’m joking … kind of. I’m a strong supporter of maintaining clean and orderly classrooms that reflect our personal values and the way we want our classrooms to run. Decoration is part of that. A thoughtful bulletin board or window display can be inspirational, informative, showcase student work, invite students to engage in our content area, and much more.

If you have trouble motivating yourself to follow through on a classroom decoration project, I recommend starting with something semi-permanent—a display that you can put up at the beginning of the year and leave in place for months or even years to come. If you can figure out a way to involve your students in the creation of the display, even better. Here’s a window display that I made several years ago by asking sixth graders on their first day of middle school to write a goal for themselves, beginning with the word “Be…” I organized their responses on a large window and left it up until the following fall, when I repeated the exercise with a new group of sixth grade students.

The art teacher in my building did something similar with her eighth grade homeroom students. She asked them to each create a square or two reflecting their understanding of the words “be the change.” The students then helped her arrange the squares in a permanent hallway display that is still in place several years later. This took time to plan and implement, but will inspire middle school students and staff for years to come.

Inspirational boards are a great choice for elementary and middle schools. My own “throw kindness like confetti” board was one of my favorites of all time, until I attempted to remove it from the wall and laminate it for preservation, at which point it promptly got stuck in the machine and destroyed. I found my inspiration for that board on Pinterest. Another of my favorite displays was made of colorful posters purchased on Teachers Pay Teachers. Each displayed an inspirational lyric from a musical. It was incredibly easy to put together and both students and staff loved it. Not a day went by that someone didn’t stand in front of the display and light up at recognizing one of the lines. I purposely chose a mix of old and new musicals to appeal to all ages.

Another display that prompted interaction was my teacher tree. The purpose of this particular display was to fill an empty wall outside my room, but it became a real point of conversation. I emailed the staff of my school and asked them to send me a brief description of their musical experience. Their responses ranged from playing the piano as a child to college orchestras, from working backstage for a theater in college to attending many, many, many Bruce Springsteen concerts. I printed out each response and hung it under an apple on the tree.

If you have a spare window or white board and a fairly active performance schedule, creating a reusable calendar can be a great use of space. My band director colleague and I created this one in the front hallway of our school, directly outside the music office. We used electrical tape to create the permanent grid and dry erase markers to write in the dates and events. At the end of each month, we simply erased everything and set-up a new month. The monthly changeover took five minutes tops and students stopped to check the calendar on a daily basis.

Now that I’m a high school teacher, I’ve handed most of the bulletin board duties over to my students. I still have a dry erase calendar, but my choral secretary creates it at the beginning of each month. My choral historian keeps the bulletin board outside of the chorus room stocked with pictures of recent student events and performances. Establishing a system like this will give your student officers meaningful work while enabling your room to stay decorated and interesting through even the busiest periods of the year!