It could be fun to spotlight teachers and staff who have even been there awhile. It would give parents and students the opportunity to find out about a teacher they may have next year or a special tidbit about the teacher they have now--like an obsession with Hershey bars.

I had planned on doing a volunteer spotlight. The only thing is, we don't have many volunteers. There are 2 of us who do the majority, with parents coming in during parties to "volunteer" to help. I may make it a new teacher spotlight because we have quite a few this year. (5 by my count) Not to mention new support staff. That should cover every month.

I'm trying something new this year with our bulletin board in the lobby. Each week we will recognize two volunteers. I will post their pictures and a short profile. It will let the kids know more about the people who give their time to make our school a better place, give these great folks some much needed recognition, and hopefully inspire others to get involved. For Open House tonight, I set the board up and just put a note on it telling what we will be doing and to watch for the new faces each week. I "warned" the kids that it could even be their MOM!!!

Thanks for the ideas. I especially love the apple idea. I know that our die cut machine needs a new blade and I doubt we will get one soon. I will see if anyone has an apple stencil I can use. I'm sure at least one of the teachers has one. We did our board today and I just printed off the dates on white paper and glued them to red and cut them in a circle. They look like big dinosaur eggs. LOL If I had the time and ambition (minus the big pregnant gut)I would love to change the background every month to suit the holiday, as it is now, we plan on doing that every 3 months and just change the dates and pertinant information monthly. We did sponge paint the slogan on there. That looks good. I plan on having a section for volunteer opportunities, one for important dates. But not sure what else. We don't do box tops or anything like that. I guess that would be enough, I just want it to be AWESOME!

Last year for our Back to School Bulletin Board Display...we purchased a bulletin board tree set. It came with the truck, the branches and the leaves...it was really cool and large enough to cover pretty much the whole display area.

We then cut apples with our die cut machine and used the apples to write each of the PTSO sponsored events/fundraisers/activities on them for the entire school year. We used the leaves for the dates of the specific events and attached them accordingly.

It was a great way to let everyone know how much we do for the school and what to expect and when. We kept it up until October when we focused in on our Harvest Festival/Silent Auction.

The company that we have found has the best bulletin board sets/displays is Classroom Direct . Check it out.

Hope it helps you out!

Lisa
John McLoughlin Elementary PTSO
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Ok. I can come up with the ideas fairly well but please keep my away from the cutting and centering. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

I was at loss last year when a teacher told me the librarian kept an updated copy of "The Mailbox" (not sure if that is the exact name). It has themes in it.

Some people use material. You can get it cheap on the clearance table at Wal-Mart. And it looks nice. The die cut machine is really handy too. I would much rather see die cut letters than someone writing free hand. I think it looks more professional, but that is just my opinion.

Also you can have a small section for reasons why people volunteer and what they can do at your school. You could even have a spotlight for volunteers. Also you could add parent involvement articles.

You could do birthdays on it too. For staff and kids.

The one I had last year I divided and made it look like two and one section was for keeping up with our Box Tops totals.

When there wasn't much going on I would put up a science experiment that I printed from www.pbs.org/zoom. I hoped these developed some family time for some families and taught a little science as well.

One year I kept up with all of our fundraising totals. We do ink cartridges, I put the Box Tops on there too and we did a local fundraiser called "Cash Back for Kids". A mall the next town over had a bin for receipts and kept a total. They would send us our monthly results.