Growth Mindset Bulletin Board

I needed a new approach with my hallway bulletin board this year, due to my new teaching position. I’m usually cutting out owls or Minions or popcorn at this time of year, but instead of welcoming a new crop of third grade students, I needed something more general and inspirational for all students.

I can’t take credit for the clever word arrangement. I saw a picture on Pinterest, but the link was dead, so if you happen to know who masterminded the arrangement of these words, please let me know so I can give proper credit. 🙂

I received many questions about this bulletin board after posting a picture on Instagram, so here are the details about how it came to be. I am using it as a back to school bulletin board, but it would be a great display at any time of the year for a wide range of grade levels. I hope that you can duplicate it for your own classroom!

I had visions of big, bright letters on a black background for this bulletin board, so I picked up some black fabric and then headed over to A.C. Moore for some scrapbooking paper. I really liked the color assortment in this heavyweight paper and if you look very closely you will notice that it has some raised polka dots that add a nice texture to the display. Of course, the 40% off sign was also very persuasive.

Next, I took the paper squares home and cut them down to 8 and a half by 11 sheets that would fit in my printer. I used PowerPoint to make some large letters as show below.

You can see in the formatting palette that I used the KG font called Behind These Hazel Eyes. This font by Kimberly Geswein is free for personal use and can be downloaded here. I set the font size to 680.

I only wanted the outline of each letter, so I formatted the text by giving it a white fill.

I set the text line to black, which would give a nice line for me to cut. Then I just printed the letters, page by page on the scrapbooking paper. Even with the texture and thickness, it went right through without a problem.

I used a different color for each word. Then I carefully cut out each letter.

Finally, I headed to school and pieced everything together on the board. I started in the middle with the vertical, white word “LEARN” and then worked my way out on either side. The words fit perfectly, but there was a lot of extra black space on the edges, so I found some matching pompoms to use as accents. They were sold in sets of two for $1.99 at Christmas Tree Shops.

Here is a close up of the letters.

Now, here’s hoping that my students will do a lot of reflecting, solving, creating, growing, thinking, and learning this year!