• Add some color to your classroom with simple decorations.colored chalks image by Radoslav Lazarov from Fotolia.com
  
  Stark white walls, rows of desks and a dominant chalkboard are common features of most secondary school classrooms. While elementary school rooms usually include colorful decorations and work completed by the young students, secondary school rooms often do not contain such engaging, lovingly created decorations. Secondary school teachers can create engaging classrooms just like their elementary counterparts. By spending some time attending to the aesthetic appeal of their classroom space, secondary teachers can produce an engaging environment conducive to learning.
  
  

Ceiling Tile Decorations

• Drop ceilings are common in classroom construction, but they are far from aesthetically pleasing. Ceilings of this type usually contain rows of large white tiles. Teachers can increase the attractiveness of this type of ceiling by decorating the tiles. Simply remove several tiles from the ceiling, and allow students to work together to decorate them. You can either cover the ceiling tiles with paper or cardboard so that the decoration is temporary, or allow the student to paint right on the tiles themselves. Provide students with acrylic paint, and allow them to decorate the rectangular ceiling parts to add pizzazz to your classroom.
  
  

Geography Wall

• Immerse your students in the study of geography by creating a geography wall. Begin your creation of this wall by locating a world map. Copy the map onto an overhead transparency. Create paper continents by attaching a large sheet of green bulletin board paper to the wall and projecting the map onto it. Pull the projector back until the image fills the entire page. Using a marker or pencil, trace the continents that you have projected onto the paper. Remove the paper from the wall, and cut out the continents. Attach the continents to the wall, or place a blue sheet of paper on the wall, and place the continents on the sheet. Use this large-scale geography wall as you teach students about world events or locations.
  
  

Quote Collection

• Create the opportunity for students to learn from the profound words of others by building a classroom quote collection. Use sentence strips to make your quote collection. Gather an assortment of profound or significant quotes from quotation dictionaries or classroom text. Write these quotes on sentence strips. Use fancy fonts or bold colors to make your quotes distinct from one another. Tape these sentence strips on one section of classroom wall, or attach them in a row along the top of the walls, circling the classroom. Turn students' attention to these quotes as they become relevant to class discussions.
  
  Encourage students to seek out and collect quotations as they engage in individual reading, and allow them to add to the classroom collection by writing the quote on a sentence strip and affixing it to the wall.