Whether you are creating the word wall for your new school year or are introducing it mid-year, it’s important to explain its use to your class. Start by going over any words that you already have placed. At the beginning, that may be as simple as the names of your students or one or two sight words. Practice with the class how to find and reference the words to read or spell.

Try to incorporate the word wall into your classroom’s daily activities for a little while to remind the class of its presence. It will acclimate them to using it as a reference tool and model for them how to use it appropriately.

Having students be involved in its creation can be a great way to help. You can have students create illustrations for vocabulary words, or help you stick up new words onto the wall. You could have them suggest new additions, or assign “Word Wall Helper” as one of your classroom jobs. Any way you like to involve them will help them learn to treat the word wall as an interactive tool in the classroom.

Before adding a new word, show them how to spell it. If you are adding a new set of homophones, talk through the various meanings and how to tell the spellings apart. Practice using them in different contexts. Show the students the visual displays you plan to hang with the words, or have them draw their own.

Try to limit yourself to adding between three and five words per week, giving yourself plenty of time to review each before adding it to the wall.

Once the word wall is an established part of your classroom, you can start incorporating it into your daily learning activities. A critical part of having this display is that you treat is as an interactive word wall, rather than a passive display. An easy way to include a word wall in your daily activities is to use it for activities you are already doing.

Word sorts are a great simple activity for kindergarten students, and an easy activity to interact with your word wall. Provide students with a page that shows various categories and blanks under each. Depending on your current area of study, the categories may vary. You may want to have the words sorted by part of speech, or by their phonetic makeup. Whatever the categories are, ask students to write in each of the word wall words into the appropriate category.

Word wall games are a great way to have some fun with the display. Using a simple game like charades is a fantastic, quick game to play with the class. Have students take turns coming to the front of the class and have them pick a word off the wall. Their job is to then use only gestures to get their classmates to guess the answer. The rest of the class will have to use the wall as reference for the possible answers to the clues, and think carefully about the meaning of each.

Bingo is another great way to get kids to practice with the word wall. Pass out blank bingo cards and have kids fill in the spaces with words chosen from the wall. Then you as the teacher can pull words off the wall at random and announce them to the classroom. Students can mark off the words as they are pulled down, and the first to get a bingo wins. You can provide an extra incentive for students who spell all of their words correctly.

Word walls are a great way to add more literacy learning into your classroom’s daily routine. With the appropriate planning and implementation, they can be a beautiful decoration and a critical educational tool for your students. By the end of the year, you’ll have a beautiful display that advertises how far your class has some with learning new vocabulary and spelling.