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By John McCarrier, Literacy Collaborative at the Ohio State University

John McCarrier is an author of several Keep Books for children. Over the last five years he has visited over 100 schools as a visiting author. He has spoken to over 15,000 students about writing. Following a career in marketing, John joined the Literacy Collaborative at the Ohio State University as a research associate. He has spoken about his experiences as a visiting author at national educational conferences and has written a chapter about this work in the book: Guiding K-3 Writers to Independence by Pat Scharer and Gay Su Pinnell.

Amy turned and pointed to sheet of paper taped to the easel. It contained a simple diagram and the words ‘story structure’. She had drawn the diagram and printed the words during the mini-lesson she had just completed. She asked the 24 kindergarteners sitting on the carpet in front of her, “Do you think we should put this on the wall? Why do we put things on the walls of our classroom? Because they look pretty? No, because they help us learn.”

I heard this comment while videotaping Amy’s writing workshop in her classroom in a school located in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. The walls of her room were filled with writing that had been done in her classroom. She had done some of it with help from her students, while some was done with input from her students but with her doing the writing. There were no colorful posters of cartoon animals from teacher supply catalogs or large images of characters from new adventure books supplied by trade book publishers.

Amy struggles with the same problem that other teachers face: how to create a welcoming physical environment for the students in her classroom that will support their literacy learning. Many aspects of a classroom’s physical environment are things that a teacher cannot control. The size of the room, the style and conditions of the desks, the size of the windows, the overhead lights, etc., are dictated by outside forces. However, a key part of the physical environment that the teacher can control is what is displayed on the walls of her classroom. Space on these walls is a valuable resource. Selecting which learning materials to display is often a difficult decision. In many classrooms, it is in short supply. Windows, doors, cabinets, and lockers often leave little space on the walls to display the variety of print necessary to create an environment conducive to the development of primary grade students as readers and writers. Finding room for word walls, name charts, workboards, lists of words, and student work is often a challenge.

As the adults who are in control in the classroom, following are a few ideas that teachers can consider as they decide what to display on the walls of their classroom.

We show our students what we value by what we display in the classroom.

If we want to demonstrate to our students that we value their work, then we should display their work whenever possible.

Every item on the walls should have one primary purpose

And that purpose should be related to student learning. Items that have multiple purposes are more difficult for students to use and can be more confusing than helpful. The purpose of a name chart, for example, is to help students link the sounds they hear in words they want to write with specific written letters. When they say a word to themselves that they want to write, they should think of the sounds they hear and the letters that go with those sounds.

If a student wants to write the word sand, she should say the word slowly to herself, listen for the first sound, s, and think to herself, "That sounds just like the beginning of Samantha's name."

Now, consider a name chart that, in addition to listing the first or last names of students in the class, includes pictures of students. The chart has conflicting purposes. The pictures do help students get to know each other during the first few weeks of school. But once the students know each other, the pictures may be more of a distraction than a help when students consult a name chart to link specific sounds and corresponding letters as they write.

A word wall should be as uncluttered and easy to read as possible.

A word wall is a display of words that students are expected to spell correctly in their writing. The words should appear on the word wall just as the students would expect to see them in a book they are reading. Color coding words or surrounding them with outlines that emphasize the shapes of individual letters makes the words more difficult to find and read. Names and pictures of students have little value on a word wall and should be displayed separately. Adding words to the word wall should be part of the daily routine in the classroom. Words should be added when they come up during normal instruction. They should be written by the teacher to ensure easy readability.

Class made, not purchased, items work best.

Students and teachers can work together in community writing to create many items traditionally purchased from vendors. This includes labels for colors, shapes, and numbers. A student who wants to use the word purple in a story is more likely to remember that it is on the wall of the classroom if he helped draw the shape and write the label for a purple triangle during community writing earlier in the year. A set of large cards, each containing a printed number and a corresponding number of items, will have more meaning to kindergarteners if they helped write the numbers and draw the items.

Students and teachers can also work together in community writing to write posters that relate to many aspects of student behavior in the classroom. A list of classroom rules may be followed more consistently if the students helped compose and record them. Appropriate voice levels may be used more often if students are reminded of when to use each of them while writing and illustrating the posters.

Teachers can write lists of words supplied by the students in shared writing sessions to, for example, illustrate common spelling patterns, display contractions, or remind students of words they have retired from the word wall. In intermediate grades, these lists can include words related to the craft of writing such as transition words, feeling words, and vocabulary.

Murals, pages for big books, and other large items that students help write during community writing should be displayed in the classroom whenever possible.

They can also be displayed in the hallway outside the classroom. Students enjoy showing visitors the things that they wrote together as a class. When students are reading around the room during center time they will be reminded of the discussions they had as a class, the decisions they made, and the craft techniques they applied when they were helping write each piece. When students are writing their own stories and want to spell a specific word correctly, they may remember that they can find it in one of the community writing projects of which they were a part. 

Display of individual student work should be given a lower priority than work done by the whole class.

If used, individual student work should be displayed for a specific purpose. If teachers use the principle stated earlier that we demonstrate what we value by what we display, it would seem that individual student work would be at the top of the priority list. Parents certainly want to see their child’s work on display during parent-teacher conferences, but during the normal school day these displays have less value than the work done by the students as a group. Students are unlikely to look closely at another student’s work and learn from it. This type of learning is more likely to happen during sharing time at the end of writing workshop when the teacher asks a few students to share their work and points out to the class what these students have done well. Displaying individual students’ work for a few days after it has been shared with the class may provide examples to other students of a specific writing technique, but these displays should be rotated quickly to provide new examples of the skills being taught.

In addition to ensuring that wall space in her classroom was used to display things that are useful learning resources, Amy constantly reminded her students of what is on the wall and how they can use it to help themselves in their own reading and writing. During a community writing lesson she asked the class, "Mother? Hmm. . . Is that a wall word?" Later, while conferring with a writer during writers’ workshop, she said, "You want to write the word son. Can you think of someone in the class who has that as part of their name that you could find on the name chart?" The student quickly found Jason’s name and wrote the word son correctly in her story.

Using wall space in a classroom to display effective learning tools that students helped create, and then reminding students to use those tools in their daily reading and writing, are two valuable strategies that all teachers can use to help their students become independent readers and writers.

 We would like to thank LearningExpress eFolio for sponsoring this blog. eFolio is an automated essay scoring program, which allows teachers to assign more practice writing without the added hours of editing and correcting.