I have to confess – I’ve never been one of those teachers who loved doing bulletin boards. When I was in my teacher training program, I did NOT long for the day that I’d put up my own butcher paper, borders, and die-cut letters.  I’ve always thought bulletin boards were a little bit of a pain. 🙂

A while ago, I decided to be very purposeful about my bulletin boards for the coming school year.  I wanted them to work for me – not create extra work for me!  I decided that I wanted my bulletin boards to meet the following criteria:

– Easy to refresh
– Consistent throughout the classroom (same background and borders)
– Dark background color (so that white paper visually pops against them)
– Have lots of space for anchor charts

The last one was especially important to me, because I love me some anchor charts.  There’s never enough space to display anchor charts in the room!  Plus, sometimes I like to add more to anchor charts after we first create them.  If they’re already hung up, that can be difficult.  So I was looking for a way to display anchor charts so that I could easily put them up and take them down.

With these things in mind, I created bulletin boards really worked for me and saved me time! Here is a picture of my math board.

I used navy cloth (from Jo-Ann fabrics) to cover the board.  I added lime green borders (Teacher Created Resources) and kept these same two elements throughout all the boards in my room.

Next, I created space for anchor charts.  I measured the chart paper pad I had in my room and then used lime green ribbon to outline two areas for chart paper.

This is not the best picture, sorry!  But at the top of my chart paper outline, I placed two clothespins.  Each clothespin is decorated with a strip of thick scrapbooking paper, and it has a thumbtack hot glued to the back of it.  To read more about making the clothespins, click {here}.

To hang anchor charts, I would just (carefully) open up the clothespins and pin up the chart paper.  If we wanted to add more to the chart, I could just take it down and then hang it back up later.  So easy!  

I left these bulletin boards up for an entire year.  They took some planning before the school year began, but they sure were low-maintenance during the year.  

If you are looking for low-maintenance bulletin boards and use a lot of anchor charts, I would definitely recommend setting up your bulletin boards this way.

For more free, fun ideas to help you organize and decorate your classroom, check out my “Classroom Organization Tools” board on Pinterest (click on the image below).

UPDATE:  By request, I’ve made a few different sets of my bulletin board letters.  If you’re interested, click on the image below!

Happy decorating!