Sound Station Phonics Display

After attending a training course with Alistair Bryce-Clegg in which he talked about classroom displays and how to make them relevant and useful to children, it got me thinking more about the displays I have in my classroom. I'm making an effort to make my displays more child-centred this year and I'm quite happy with how my phonics display has turned out.

I decided to go with a space theme, making phonics sounds on aliens. I split these into Phase 2 and Phase 3 sounds on the board, separating them with a silver line to make it easy for the kids to know which side to look at when trying to identify a specific sound. 

I am trying to give children much more ownership of the displays in the classroom, so I gave them each a photograph of their face and they found the sound that their name begins with and stuck their face onto the alien. This instantly made them more interested in the display as they were involved in it. 

We then discussed our favourite cartoon characters and stuck them onto the faces of the aliens. The kids loved that all of their interests and favourite characters were incorporated into the classroom.

The children's involvement and use of their interests has definitely made the children engage with the display more then simply laminated resources and sticking them up. They regularly look at the display to support them with their work or copy the sounds and characters when playing. It really does make the time and effort that goes into a display so much more worthwhile when the children are using it. 

The aliens can be downloaded here.

Have you involved children in your phonics displays? I'd love to see some examples!