One of the not so many tasks of an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) in Japan is updating the school’s English Bulletin Board.

In my school where I’m assigned, in fact, the only school I am assigned (normally ALTs are assigned to more than one school), I make sure to update our English Board every month.

In the first semester (April, May, June, July), I kept the board pretty simple. I put up some world updates, some English greetings and words, and also a daily update of day, date and weather.

I started changing the board according to the monthly event/theme in the second semester, that is from September, right after summer vacation in August.

But, unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of my September board.

So let’s start with October.

 

As you can see, it’s Helloween, I mean, Halloween theme. I just put a little twist to the word to make it more catchy. I made three big jack-o-lanterns and aligned it under a maple tree. I printed one maple leaf and traced it to colored papers, of course autumn colors since it’s autumn and just put it all over the cut out tree. The origamis are made by students during lunch break, when they come to the ‘English Lounge’, well, basically just tables and chairs in front of the English board and we gather there and chat while making origamis.

Next is November.

I kept the maple tree in November board since it still autumn but I removed the jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween things and put a colorful turkey on it. November is Thanksgiving so that explains the ‘Give Thanks’, right? If you look closely, the turkey’s feathers contain ‘Thank you’ in different languages. Some (that Mexico thing) are reused from the previous years’ bulletin board. It’s a waste to throw them away. Why not recycle, right?

Here comes December.

The black background has been there for three months. I find black background so easy to decorate but I admit, I was getting sick of it, so I added white background below it to represent snow. The students like the snowman but I personally like the reindeer. Those are all cut-outs. Well, I had a plenty of time to make these things. 🙂

The January board was not really the best but I have to tell you, this is the most, should I say, tedious, to make. I decided to make cut-outs of Snoopy and friends’ characters since it is year of the dog. All the red letters are cut-out too, but when I put a white background into it, it looked like printed words. :-/ The new year greetings in different languages are printed. Nothing complicated. And below is the outcome.

Next week, I will update the bulletin board for February. I already prepared some heart cut-outs but I still don’t know the final outcome. Nothing in mind. We’ll just see.