Hey Everyone, 

I just thought i would put out a nice thread here and start a discussion on the use of boards in the classroom. As a classroom teacher, we use boards in class almost everyday. They are a great teaching tool. In my experience I have used many different boards to teach. I have used black boards, felt boards, white boards, and even smart boards. They are all different and effective in the learning process in their own ways. Recently I moved from a school that had smart boards and projectors in every classroom, to a smaller school that had white boards. I found myself trying to use my finger to write on the board or looking for an "on" switch. It must have looked really silly to my students. Anyway, what are your thoughts? What kind of board do you prefer in you classroom when teaching? Maybe we can use this post to discuss advantages of each kind of board and how we use it for classroom activities.

 

With tenses, you can shout out a verb and ask the pupils to write down the past participle.

With a theme like "booking a hotel", you can read out the room booking and ask them to draw the facts (e.g. draw a double bed, a shower and a 3 for "3 nights").

With sentence work, you can give them a basic sentence, then ask them to insert an adverb or adjective in the correct position.

With vocabulary, you can ask them to write the translation of a given word, or draw a picture, or write down as many words as possible related to a theme (e.g. animals) in 10 seconds.

You can do a class-wide gap-fill exercise  -write up a sentence with a missing word and ask them to write down a suitable word to fill the gap.

They are great for numbers - the teacher reads out a number, or a price, or a phone number, or a date, and the pupils write the digits.

I like to run it either as a competition (first three boards shown with a correct answer) or as an exercise to see how many people have understood the rule -  so give pupils 10 or 15 seconds to write the answer then shout out "boards up!" and see how many correct answers appear, then give the whole class feedback based on the answers you see. That stops certain pupils feeling picked on for having an incorrect answer.