April's Bulletin Board: School Library Month (and a few bulletin board strategies)

I just flipped my calendar, so that means it's time for a new bulletin board. Although we try to mix library programming and curriculum into many of the bulletin boards around the school, I pay special attention to the board right outside the library door. Although bulletin boards aren't a new trend, I think it's still a great form of passive program advocacy.

As April is National School Library Month, it served as the inspiration for the board. AASL's 2018 theme is "Making Connections," so I ran with the puzzle imagery and color palette in the promotional materials.  


When I have time, I enjoy getting all creative, but when I'm scheduled to my eyeballs, maintaining the bulletin board becomes a chore. I am by no means a bulletin board expert, but I do have a few strategies and tools I regularly use to quickly get something up that looks okay. 

1) In my head, I divide the bulletin board into zones - so different parts of the board have different content, all connected by a theme. When I try to fill the board with all the same thing, it ends up looking sparse. If I mentally think of the board as a bunch of different zones, it's easier to generate content that "fills up" the space. So for April board, I dedicated one zone or area to the puzzle graphic I created:


As part of this zone, I included a "subtitle" sign -- "You Make Connections @ The Durgee Library and Learning Commons" as well as a sign that depicts some of our statistics. 


For this bulletin board, in keeping with the AASL theme, I framed our statistics with the idea of connections, so I included the number of books we connected to readers, the number of classes we connected to computer labs, and the number of visitors we connected to resources. 

In the middle zone of the bulletin board I hung student responses to a prompt. I had this chart paper up in the library over the last two weeks and asked students to tell me why they visited the library. You could also post this to your board WITHOUT any answers on it -- allowing kids to add to it over the course of the month. 


In the final zone I hung the AASL promotional poster for School Library Month. I liked that it tied my theme and colors together and gave some basic information on the event. You can download a copy of it here. I also made a poster with a graphic that's been floating around on Twitter. Jason Reynolds is the spokesperson for AASL's School Library Month, so I thought the quote was appropriate to include on the board. 


2) Utilize free promotional graphics. Why spend time making my own School Library Month poster when AASL has done it for me? Think of all the free posters and graphics you get from vendors at library conferences or those released for advocacy purposes. Use them ON your board and as an INSPIRATION for other content on the board. 

3) I couldn't live without our Cricut machine (we currently have a Cricut Explore but I'm thinking about upgrading to the Cricut Maker). A couple years ago I used a portion of my library budget to buy a Cricut and it's gotten a TON of use. It's available to students in the Makerspace, but it also gets a lot of use by teachers. It's definitely worth the money if you're in charge of bulletin boards. For April's board, I used it to make the letters in the title and the puzzle piece graphic. 

4)  In addition to Cricut, I love Canva. Almost every bulletin board I develop utilizes posters I generate in Canva. I have Photoshop and Publisher on my computer, but Canva is just so quick and easy, and I get professional looking results every time. I've used my own money to subscribe to a "pro" account because I use it so frequently. 

Got any bulletin board strategies for me? What tips and tricks do you do to speed up the process AND feel good about the finished product?

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