Tricks & Tips for Teachers: Hanging Student Work with Clothespins {A Weekly Linky}

{Collaboration and sharing is a great way to learn and grow as a teacher! Tricks and Tips for Teachers is a weekly linky party held every Thursday as a place for you to join in and share a post about a teaching tip or trick on your blog. Just grab the button above and link it back to this post. Then come back to this post and link up your blog post by using the linky tool at the bottom of this post. I can't wait to read your great tricks and tips and learn and grow together!}

I LOVE hanging student work! It is so important for our students to feel pride and ownership of their work! My mom used to always hang our work on our refrigerator at home, but since my classroom doesn't have a refrigerator, I had to create my own place to hang "fridge-worthy" work! I don't have much wall space in my current classroom, so I decided to use the middle bulletin boards on my closet doors to create a space to display student work.

I wanted an efficient and easy way to display my students work inside of the classroom. Stapling or making tape donuts is very time consuming--trust me I did it my whole first year!! While there is nothing wrong with staples or tape donuts--I still use them for other things, I knew that if I was going to change out my student work on a regular basis I needed to work smarter and not harder! So I said  goodbye to the staples and tape donuts and HELLO to clothespins! 

Clothespins are inexpensive (you can find a pack at the dollar store), they hang work like a boss, and they are easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy to use to change out student work! Work that used to take me 15-20 minutes to staple or tape donut can now be taken down and put up in 2-3 minutes! That is winning in my book! It also means that I will switch out my student work more often too!

My little trick to using clothespins to hang student work is to hot glue 2 thumbtacks onto the clothespin--1 thumbtack at the top and 1 thumbtack at the bottom. This allows the clothespin to be stuck right into your bulletin board and then all you need to do is open and close the clothespin to hang your students' work! Just to make it look prettier, I designated the hanging spots on the bulletin board by stapling laminated black cardstock paper to the bulletin board and then putting the clothespin with thumbtacks on top of it (see picture above).

What tips or tricks will you share this week? I can't wait to read them!

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