Classroom Pennant / Bunting Display

Turn any heading into a classroom bunting display

Every classroom needs a few standout headings. Over the reading corner, above the word wall, around a seasonal display board or strung across the front of the room on the first day back. This classroom pennant display maker turns any phrase you type into ready-to-print bunting: each letter is printed large on its own pennant flag, so you can spell out WELCOME, OUR CLASS RULES, STAR OF THE WEEK or a class motto without designing a thing. Type the words, pick a look, and print.

Each flag prints one bold capital letter sized to fill the pennant, with optional punch-hole markers and a faint string guide across the top so the flags hang straight once threaded onto ribbon or baker's twine.

A display heading has to last a year

This is the difference that matters between a classroom banner and a party one: a party banner is up for an afternoon, and a classroom heading is up until July. Everything about how you make it should follow from that.

Print on card rather than paper — 160gsm or heavier — or laminate ordinary paper. Both survive a year of doors slamming and a display being reshuffled; copier paper curls within a fortnight above a radiator.

Choose the phrase for longevity too. WELCOME, OUR WORK, READING CORNER and GOOD WORK are headings you will still want in March. A topic name is a heading you will be remaking at half term, which is fine if you know that going in and cut the flags to a size you can reprint quickly.

Working in school colours

Set the flag colour to your school's and the display stops looking like it came from a printable site. Most schools have two colours in their logo; using the darker as the flag and white or the lighter as the letter reads from the back of a classroom, which is the actual test.

If your display board is backed in a strong colour already, do the opposite — white flags with a dark letter sit on top of a busy board where a coloured flag disappears into it. A quick check: photograph the empty board, hold the printed flag against the photograph on screen, and you will see immediately whether it separates.

Keep one set of flags in each of your two school colours in a folder. Reusing them for a new heading next term is a two-minute job if the letters already exist.

Where the bunting actually goes

Above the board, not on it. A heading strung along the wall above a display leaves the whole board for children's work, which is the thing the display is for — and a paper heading pinned onto the board itself eats the top fifth of it.

Other places that work: across the front of a book corner shelf, along the edge of a window (letters facing in), and above a door for a WELCOME. Corridor displays want fewer, larger letters than classroom ones, because they are read while walking.

Use the spacer flags between words. A multi-word heading run together is hard to read at four metres, and the spacer is the whole reason it stays legible — it is doing the job that a space does on a page.

Letting the class make it

The flags print with the letter outlined rather than as a solid block, which makes them a colouring task as well as a display.

Hand out one flag per child, let them colour or pattern their own letter, and string the finished heading. Every letter is different, the display belongs to the class rather than to you, and a job that would have taken your evening takes their twenty minutes. It also solves the perennial problem of a class of thirty and a heading of nine letters — print the heading twice, or add the class name after it.

Do laminate these ones. A flag a child has coloured is not a thing you want to be remaking in November.