The Interactive Bulletin Board

We are the reading room, in which I do not need to plan bulletin board space for math, daily schedule, calendar or science. This leaves me the luxury to use a lot of space for reading strategies and for anchor charts. 

In the past I have created anchor charts with students and displayed them. Yet I questioned how much they were used once they were posted. This year I incorporated the anchor charts as part of the bulletin board. A goal for first and second graders is to retell stories, which includes the characters, the setting and the events of the story. Thus our bulletin board reflects these elements of a story.

Using mentor texts, second graders have investigated characters and the settings of stories. We have now added our thoughts and examples found on our anchor bulletin board. 

On top of the chart are questions we can ask to help tell or write about characters.
On  the side are examples from anchor test. 

As a group we read Toot and Puddle by Holly Hobbie and discovered that asking questions about what characters like, what they want and how characters act, guide us to be able to tell a lot about characters in stories.

We enjoyed Peter Brown's story Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. We found that the setting can change in the same story, Mr. Tiger lives in the city yet leaves for the wild. Students are now including the setting of their books when retelling the story.

One of my favorite aspects of this bulletin board is the stickies, which are easily inter changeable as we continue reading more. We will continue our learning as we work on retelling events of our stories.