When Jill Steelhammer started teaching, the classroom bulletin board was for displaying student work. Now, with so much material to get through and so little time, classroom decorations have become another teaching tool.

“It’s way more interactive now than it was 25, 30 years ago,” she said, pointing out a math display in a fifth-grade classroom at Ponderosa Elementary School in Bend that showed 17 ways to solve a problem: look for patterns, explain the problem to someone else, use logic and reasoning, and so on.

Teachers in Bend are spending this week before school starts getting their classrooms just so.

There’s an art and a science to arranging a room, the look of which can set the tone for the whole school year.

You want students to feel welcome, engaged, ready to learn.

You want to remind them what’s important.

You don’t want to overload them.

“It’s like I swirl (around), there’s so much to do,” said Kirstin Winslow, a second-grade teacher at Lava Ridge Elementary School. “We have to put everything away at the end of the year and bring it back at the beginning of the year.”

On Thursday morning, Winslow was hanging metal pizza trays on the front wall of her room. On each tray were students’ names printed on magnets, so she can assign and reassign reading groups all year.

Schools in Bend-La Pine do get annual supply budgets, but for decorations or extra furniture or materials they’ll use year after year, many teachers pay out of pocket.

Winslow bought the pizza trays, along with the rug and beanbag chairs in the library corner, a row of filing crates and a supply of extra spiral notebooks. For science experiments she has a cabinet full of straws and borax and fishing line and pickling salt, all of which she bought.

When she switched from teaching fifth grade to second a few years ago, Winslow spent so much on supplies she never got around to adding it up.

Next door, kindergarten teacher Jill Misener was preparing to write the names of her students on their folders, storage bins and math journals and on the paint stirrers she uses to decide whose turn it is (“You just pick a stick”).

All of this will be waiting for students on their first day of school.

“So they feel like it’s their room, too. ‘Oh, my teacher loves me, they wrote my name,’” she said.

This is Misener’s 25th year teaching. In the beginning, she wanted her classroom to look nice. Now, it’s more about making students comfortable — and the teacher, for that matter.

“This is my room. This is my space,” said Christine Clark, who teaches French and Spanish at Sky View Middle School, of her decorating philosophy. “I spend more time awake here than I do at home.”

Clark has been at Sky View since it opened in 2000 and has changed classrooms six times, most recently this summer. Her new room has fewer windows than her last, but it seems bigger and there’s an extra bulletin board. (“I’ve never had three bulletin boards. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that one.”)

She’s been coming in since mid-August to get it ready. The walls are decorated with posters of Snoopy and Johnny Depp explaining the difference between the Spanish verbs “ser” and “estar.” On the other side of the room are photos of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, sardine fishermen of St. Guenole and a market in Provence, where Clark is from.

“I have had students in the past tell me, ‘Put France on the walls,’” she said. “They want to see what it looks like. They want to feel it.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7837,

aspegman@bendbulletin.com