DO WORKING WALLS WORK?

Many professional teachers often wonder 'is the working wall working?' 
​here are a few top tips and rules to decide for yourself if it is working for you in your classroom. 

why use them?

1.  Children have ownership of them and so use them more and they have created them.
2. The working wall encourages independence; the children know where to go to find the vital information need for the lesson.
3. Children are more engaged in their learning due to the reminders and prompts on the working walls - they have created them!
4. Children have a better understanding of expectations

basic working wall rules

Teach from or at the wall (it aids memory and raises the importance of the work on the wall)
Get children to add to the wall or work on it themselves
Give children an overview and end goal for literacy, at the start of the unit, so they can see how every day’s lesson is for a purpose
Talk to children about the contents and if they’re not using them, take them down
Use the wall to regularly review what we know, including new vocabulary.  Don’t just put things up on the wall and the leave them.  Use them again.

strategies to get children to use it!

Cover and find – hide something and ask children what is hidden or missing?
Expert – if a child has a piece of work on the wall, they become the expert in that area and other children can ask them for help
Improvement – go back to work done in week one or two and added to the wall and improve it as a class
Spot the mistake – change something so it’s wrong or give them contradictory information so they have to use the working wall
Two minutes – challenge them in small bursts to decide what is the most useful thing on the wall, list features in order of importance, find five adjectives etc
Why? – ask why something is on the wall.  How will it actually help us with our work? if not, take it down! 

IF YOU HAVE A GREAT WORKING WALL, EMAIL A PICTURE TO [email protected] TO BE FEATURE ON THE WEBSITE.