While I tend to stay away from bulletin boards with expiration dates, after Christmas, I wasn't ready for the department to revert back to its non-holiday self. 

. . .

And then I put all my pieces on the board and it took even MORE cutting. 

 Here's why . . .

My background paper was 18 inches too short for my board! 

No way my border could hide that much.

Urgh, why did I have paper in my closet that couldn't cover the entire area? Who knows. 

After realizing the problem, I took down my pink background paper and moved it towards the center so I had bulletin board showing on either side that needed to be covered- it was dark blue. 

To hide the dark blue, I stuck a different color than my hearts over the blue and then piled hearts on top of that.

See? 

Looks intentional, right?

Either way, super proud of myself for pulling that idea out of thin air so squirrel that away for yourself. 

 

 

 

To make the action bubbles, I cut out the shape on colored cardstock and then cut out a smaller version of the shape on regular printer paper. 

The smaller white shape was glued on top of the larger shape. 

There were 3 different shapes I used: 1 bubble cloud and 2 zig-zag-starbursty shapes. 

Here's a messy template for the 2 different sized starburst shapes. 

TEMPLATE FOR COLORED CARDSTOCK 💚 PRINT 3 

 TEMPLATE FOR WHITE PRINTER PAPER 💚 PRINT 2

If you have teen volunteers, this would be a good project for them to work on! 

But hope this helps inspire you or helps you find a direction for your bulletin board. 

This is mainly biographical but does include one page for the Tuskegee Airmen. 

I wanted to have an assortment of figures and pulled from different books we have in the library about prominent African American figures from history and contemporary. 

Here's a list of who is included:

• Jesse Owens
• Harriet Tubman
• Bessie Coleman
• Barrack Obama
• Shirley Chisholm
• Madam CJ Walker
• Muhammad Ali
• Simone Biles
• Rosa Parks
• Jason Reynolds
• Michael Jordan
• Katherine Johnson
• Thurgood Marshall
• Tuskegee Airmen
• Angela Davis
• Mae Jemison
• Martin Luther King Jr. 
• Misty Copeland
• John Lewis
• Leah Chase (this is the woman who inspired Disney's Princess and the Frog)
  
• Frederick Douglass
• Ruby Bridges
• Charles Henry Turner
• Serena Williams
• George Washington Carver
• Jackie Robinson
• Maya Angelou
• Bass Reeves

Each booklet takes about 8 (?) pages to print so it does involve using up some paper. 

Assembly: Once printed off, each page was cut along the dotted line, put in chronological order and stapled into a booklet.

If this is something you're interested in, here's the link to the PDF.

Click HERE for the LINK but keep reading for some tidbits about printing . . . 

Tidbit #1: If you can, print (1) front and back and (2) flip on the short edge

Tidbit #2: This is only relevant if you want to save paper. There will be an odd number of pages in the assembled booklet so to save paper, I made pages 15 & 16 of the PDF identical. Here's a visual to explain better what I want to say . . .

If possible, I would suggest setting a custom print of 1-14 for the exact number of booklets you need. Because PDF pages 15 & 16 will give you 2 identical booklet pages, print off half the number you need for those pages.

 While not all of these picture books were published in 2021, they are newer titles (published within the last 5 years or so) and are stand-out books based on artwork, humor, theme or general story. Here are my favorites of 2021 in no particular order!

In this one, we read the narrative non-fiction book, "Teddy: The Remarkable Tale of a President, a Cartoonist, a Toymaker and a Bear" by James Sage.This book is about how Theodore Roosevelt's refusal to shoot a captured bear led to a comic and how that comic led to a husband/wife pair creating Teddy Bears.

Honestly, this book probably falls in my top 20 books to read out loud just because it has several characters in it and also a New York accent to include. 

Songs:

We sang 2 different bear songs . . . 

If You're A Bear and You Know It

If you're a panda bear and you know it clap your paws...

If you're a polar bear and you know it show your teeth...

If you're a grizzly bear and you know it growl real loud...

If you're a black bear and you know it eat some berries... 

and then we sang

Let's Go On A Bear Hunt.

Lets go on a bear hunt

We're going to catch a big one

With Big green eyes

and a fuzzy tail

Oh lookie, -

And for this one we did. . . 

There's a gate . . .  gotta go through it

There's a rock . . . gotta climb over it

There's a river . . .  gotta swim across it

There's a log . . . gotta crawl under it

There's a cave . . . gotta go in it. 

And of course, that's where we find our bear and reverse the actions in the song all the way home.

Here's something neat

One thing I'm not sure I ever noticed or anyone else ever shared with me, it's entirely possible that without Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot that black bear, we would not have Winnie the Pooh.

Roosevelt's hunting trip happened in 1902 when he was invited by the Govenor of Mississippi to come hunt black bears on a trip. Winnie the Pooh wasn't published until 1926. The bear who inspired Winnie the Pooh, was bought by Harry Colebourn in August 1914 and that December was when Winnie went to live at the London Zoo. Sometime after that is when A.A.Milne and his son, Christopher Robin visited and named his teddy bear after Winnie, the beat at the zoo.

But it was the story about Theodore Roosevelt who inspired stuffed teddy bears and in the years following 1902, the toys became super popular.

So, it's just a thought.