In my Education room at Boys & Girls Club of the Smoky Mountains, I wanted to come up with a way to keep my decor fresh without a lot of effort. Plus there is just *so much information* I wanted to share with my members. So what I came up with was what I called an “Inspiration Board” that I updated weekly.
I know that it is a little hard to see, but all I did was create backgrounds in Powerpoint that were just headings, and then another Powerpoint template for the weekly posts. (You can find my background template here: Weekly Inspiration Board and a sample week of content here: Sample Weekly Board.) The categories I chose were
- Super Awesome Person You Probably Haven’t Heard Of
- Fun Fact!
- This Week’s Point to Ponder
- This Week In History
Then each Monday before members arrived, I would put up that week’s post. I can’t tell you how often kids ran in my room to check the board. One high school girl would ask me for her favorite Points to Ponder, and pretty soon her binder was covered in inspirational quotes.
Now let me assure you, while my intention was to make something with little effort, this was NOT little effort. It was actually QUITE A LOT of effort. But it was my favorite kind, because it gave me the perfect excuse to learn all kinds of fun things! One tip that helped out tremendously was to set aside some time to make a whole bunch of weeks up at once, particularly to cover the summer. I would print out a month at a time and keep them in a file folder ready to go.
I got the information from a bunch of different sources. Here are a few:
- Pinterest- That is where all of my Points to Ponder came from. You can find fun facts there as well.
- Mental Floss- This website is full of all kinds of trivia. On Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook they post ready made images with captions. I would often just copy and paste those! Here’s an example from Facebook and one from Instagram.
- This book– It is called “Celebrations!: 2,954 Holidays and Events / 1,000 Different Ways to Remember Them,” and has monthly, weekly, and daily historical events and weird holidays. It is also an amazing resource for activity ideas. I used it weekly at the Club (and when I was an elementary school teacher). WORD OF CAUTION: A few of the dates are not correct. I suggest a quick Google to be sure before posting, which you’d want to do to get a photo anyway.
- History.com’s This Day in History– If there wasn’t anything in the Celebrations book, I would check out this site. They do a long write up of one event each day and also have a list of a ton of others.
- A Mighty Girl– I always tried to be intentional about making sure I was including underrepresented people groups on the board. A Mighty Girl is a great place to learn about both historical women but also women who are making an impact today. They also post tons of resource links for books and activities.
To keep the tradition going, I will post some of my favorite, beautifully designed quotes on the BGCA Youth Development Facebook page and will catalog them all over on Pinterest. You can use them to make your own Inspiration Board, share them in staff meetings (My Director did this! It was a great way to remind us of our mission), or just enjoy them yourself. We have important, hard jobs, and a little inspiration never goes unappreciated.
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