Before I was a math teacher I had originally planned to be an elementary school teacher. I thought that because I had worked with younger students in the past that elementary would be the perfect fit for me. To be honest, I was a little intimidated by middle and high school students.
I have always been creative and I loved doing bulletin boards and all of the cutesy classroom decorations that go along with elementary school. I was so excited to have a classroom of my own and spent hours scrolling through Pinterest.
However, as soon as I did my student teaching I realized that elementary school was not going to be for me. This meant that my dream of having a super cute classroom was crushed.
In my first few years of teaching I tried to find ways to decorate and organize my classroom that weren’t super young and immature for the high school student population.
I really struggled to find good ideas and classroom decorations specifically for high school math teachers. There were word walls and informational math posters but there weren’t a lot of ideas for math related bulletin boards and other decorations.
I started to use this as a creative outlet to make my own math themed decorations for my classroom and I loved it. In this blog post, I’m sharing some of my favorite bulletin boards and decorations that I have created and used in my high school math classroom. Hopefully you’ll find some inspiration too!
Bulletin boards have so much potential to be educational or motivational. They really tie together the environment of a classroom and help your students get to know you more as a person.
I’m a huge fan of educational bulletin boards that either have references for students to use while they are practicing or collaborative bulletin boards that all of my students have contributed to.
Problem Solving Skills
This bulletin board set will give your students a constant reminder of the problem solving strategies that they can use when they are “stuck” on a math problem.
Collaborative
This is a great activity for the day or week before winter break! My students loved coloring their piece of the bulletin board then seeing it come together and I loved that they were practicing multiplying polynomials on a day they usually don’t want to do school work.
Women in Mathematics
Use this bulletin board set to celebrate Women’s History Month or year round to show the achievements these seven women made in the development of mathematics.
Educational decor:
There are lots of classroom decorations out there for math teachers that double as reference sheets. Most are aimed for elementary and middle school, but you will find a few really helpful posters that work for high school math classrooms!
Math Posters
Word Walls
Square Roots and Square Cubes
My students always forget the perfect squares and cubes. These math posters come in handy when I’m teaching factoring. Instead of fielding endless questions about perfect squares, I can just point up at the wall!
Inspirational decor
Posters
Motivational posters are a classic in any high school classroom. You can use velcro dots to interchange the posters throughout the year.
Bulletin Boards
This iceberg bulletin board can be used in any subject or grade level. It is a great message regardless of the time of year!
This was one of my first bulletin boards and still one of my favorites! I always tell my students that real life skills and thinking critically is more important than any of the math concepts they learn.
Let’s be honest, they won’t remember how to factor a trinomial, but hopefully they will continue to persevere through problems.
Making It Personal
Math Posters
These digital download math posters were the perfect amount of math and inspirational decor to create a gallery wall behind my desk! They come in four different sizes so that you can mix and match them in your classroom.
The Fridge
This was one of my favorite bulletin boards because it was always changing and showcased student work!
My final thoughts about math classroom decor
Keeping up with constantly changing decor can be A LOT of work. There are some teachers who spend hours on bulletin boards and love keeping them fresh. They tend to change their bulletin board every month.
For me, this was just not practical. The schedule that worked for me was about once a season. This typically fell on the day or two before a school break where my students could be catching up on work and I could enlist some students to help me put up new decorations.
However you decide to decorate your classroom, your students are sure to love it because it is a representation of you!