How Can I Use Poster-Making to Facilitate Learning in the Classroom?

Art and craft activities have always been a favored medium to stimulate and develop creativity within students. Poster making and poster presentation is one such activity that is common in many classrooms. How can we make it even more effective to facilitate learning? Let’s take a look at some innovative ways by which we can incorporate this very familiar task in our classrooms.

Poster projects: Poster making can be done in pairs or groups with students working on a common topic or separate topics. Abstract topics help to stimulate the flow of ideas and encourage students to think out of the box. Presenting the posters in front of the class also opens up a forum of discussion for the students.

Opening statement: Creating a poster presentation of the topics that you will teach in class is always more visually appealing and interesting instead of listing or writing down the same on the black board.

Interpret the poster: Introduce a poster and ask your students to interpret the same. Learning will occur as students introspect, critically analyze and introspect on the poster.

Poster closure: Once a lesson has been covered, teachers can instruct the students to create a poster outlining the key information that constitutes the lesson. It can be a simple pen paper activity but will most certainly require the students to combine their thoughts and learning.

Structure the poster: In this task the teacher can give words related to the topic and ask the students to form a poster. Each group can be given a subtopic and will need to decide what their poster must focus on. Teachers will be able to both test the students’ knowledge and understand if they have any misunderstandings.

Jumbled poster: To learn events in the chronological order or in sequence, create a poster and cut into pieces. Give the students the pieces and ask the them to rearrange the pieces to and put the poster together.

Here are some more creative poster making projects that can add life to your lesson!

Ask students to create a poster to educate others about a particular issue- like recycling, or exercising regularly.

Ask students to create a poster pretending that they are part of a story and are inviting people for an event in the story. (like a poster inviting the town for the ball in the Cinderella story)

Ask students to create a poster-infographic to explain statistics or share the results of a study that they did.

Ask students to create a poster to remind themselves of or remember an important learning strategy, or classroom rule.

You may ask students to create an alert poster for a fake hurricane, to help them learn about weather alerts.

Ask students to make a 3d poster without using any pens, paints or markers.

Why Posters?

From the list of activities given above, it is obvious that posters can have quite a positive effect on the process of learning. The best advantage of poster making is that it facilitates team work and understanding along with facilitating creative thinking and extensive research and reading. It provides students with an opportunity to learn by doing, in turn strengthening the learning. Students are able to visually represent the key points and while presenting elaborate on the same which facilitates their retention and recall of events and facts. Poster making and presentation is also an effective tool for evaluating the students’ knowledge and creates opportunities for active discussion and participation. Be it the traditional posters or technologically advanced computer presentations, poster making and presentations can actively engage students in their learning process.

Discuss here:  What are some creative ways in which you use poster-making in your classroom, as a learning tool?

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