ANTicipate Challenge Bulletin Board: The Leader in Me

This is our new bulletin board in the ACCESS gifted program hallway. We wanted to have a motivational board that matched the Leader in Me banners that we have hanging all along the ceiling.

(we try to connect everything back to the 7 Habits of Happy Kids)

We'd talked about the idea of teamwork and how ants are such a good example of teamwork in action. We'd seen a certificate you could print out on one of the free sites that had this basic idea and we brainstormed from there.

We cut all three pieces of each ant from an 11 x 17 inch piece of construction paper. The middle section is smaller and the end section is pointier than the head. We made 7 of them. We stretched them across, over the water, with four on the bottom, making the bridge, and three of them walking confidently across the ant-bridge. We used big black pipe stem cleaners for their 6 legs and the antenna. We bent them and positioned them in different poses to give them character and a sense of movement. I just love them and think they turned out looking so industrious!

The green grass, brown cliffs, and water are all cut from poster paper. You could easily adjust this idea to the size of your bulletin board.

To the left we have a sign that says "Look What We Know!"

We couldn't resist the pun here by putting "ANTicipate Challenge!"

The sign on the right says, "Watch Us Grow!!" 

Just above the 15-foot-long board we have a sign that says, "TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More!"

We took the students out into the hallway and asked them to silently take a long look at the board, noticing the details and thinking about WHY we (their gifted team-teachers) chose to make this particular bulletin board. We told them after 3-5 minutes they were to go back into the Hub and write a piece explaining what we were trying to get them to learn from the bulletin board.

Some of those writing pieces were very self-reflective and tally worth the time it took to plan and execute this eye-catching and motivating bulletin board. We like to think Steven Covey would be proud of our hallway, our banners, our bulletin board, and most of all, our students.