Repurposing Decor for Vocabulary Instruction

I recently popped into Michaels for a few art supplies, and as usual, I found myself wandering down the home decor aisles. I love everything about this collection, first of all. The bright colors and vintage vibe fit perfectly with my classroom style. Beyond that though, there is so much potential for vocabulary instruction here. Just imagine displaying small vocabulary cards on the bunting board in your writing center or as part of your focus board! The cork board speech bubble would be perfect to hang outside of your classroom as a password board. (You could pin a vocabulary word to the cork every day to have students tell the definition or synonym or antonym or use it in a sentence as they enter the classroom.)

When I saw these speech bubble displays, I thought it would be a perfect way to display a Word of the Day or a Word of the Week. Maybe you could even display student-generated sentences using vocabulary words. How fun would that be?!

As you can see, I almost walked out with these little speech bubbles.  You can write on them with chalk, or you can clip an index card to the top to display a word.  I thought this would be a great way to display the words near our word work center since they could be double-sided to use with word sorting activities.

I ended up walking out without the extras, and for once, I actually stuck to my shopping list. However, I plan on going back to pick up a few items when they finally go on sale. I love using props to hook even my most reluctant students, and I know that these items would definitely be attention-grabbers. How would you use these items?  Do you have any creative ideas? Share in the comments below!  I’d love to hear from you!