Focus Walls

What are focus walls?

Focus Walls are a permanent installation in the classroom for teachers, students, and administrators to reference at the beginning, during, and following a class or subject period. They normally include vocabulary, questions, and images that reference the subject material.

What's awesome about focus walls, is that they're consistent throughout the year and add a cohesiveness between units/areas of study and a predictability that helps students with new content. If they know what to reference every new unit, and its kept the same format, they're more likely to use it!

The issue with focus walls, is that they take a lot of work to put together. To create an effective set of focus walls, you need to look at everything, decide what the important/consistent elements are, format everything to match, and then add all the content. Depending on how many important elements you identified, it could take a while to get through even one unit. However, the work is worth it, because if you organize and label everything, it should make displaying and switching out the information much easier!

My focus walls for CKLA include newly introduced vocabulary, focus comprehension questions for ranges of chapters, writing questions for ranges of chapters, chapter/story titles, daily bell-ringers/writing prompts, lesson-aligned standards, character/important people/important places cards, a spot to display the read aloud, a spot for vocabulary cards, and a spot for grammar.

All these pieces together really help students when they may be lost or struggling with the content, plus administrators really like it when your standards are posted and accurate! This resource takes the thinking out of making sure your standards are accurate to the lesson. You can also use the focus question and writing questions to assess student understanding of the material after each block of lessons. Depending on the unit, the number of lessons in each block of focus will change.

Above, I provided an example of the formatting I used for my CKLA focus walls. On the left (first, if you're using a phone) image carousel are the content cards for this resource. Each content card has the unit number, as well as clear signage on what lesson it applies to! This signage will either be clearly labeled at the bottom next to the unit number, or it will be along the top as part of the content page. The right (second, if using a phone) image carousel shows the "base" cards, which are used throughout the entire year. Each content card is formatted to fit inside the blank, white square of the base cards. If you look at the gif, it should show you all the color options available for the CKLA focus walls, not just my boring earth-tone theme! (I love boring, lol!)

I recommend printing off all your focus wall cards, laminating them, adding magnet tape to the back if your focus wall is on a magnetized whiteboard, clipping similar units together in order (and putting them back in order too, it'll make your life SO much easier!), and placing them in folders or boxes for easy access close to the focus wall itself. Also, I highly recommend getting a shelf to add to the focus wall where you can display your read aloud book. I always misplace mine, so having a home for my own read-aloud book was the best thing I did for myself.

If you'd like to see how I use my focus wall & other resources in my classroom, check out my Short & Sweet post, where I slice and dice the curriculum to fit the timeframe I have and to meet the needs of my students.

I hope this gave you some ideas for what to do in your own classroom!

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