All teachers love stationery – I get giddy at the thought of a visit to Staples. I seem to collect endless types of notebooks and I really, really do have a pencil case of favourite felt-tip pens that I refuse to lend to anyone.  Sad, but true. However, the most useful and multifunctional of all this delicious stationery is the post-it note.  It comes in an endless array of colours, shapes and sizes which merely adds to my love of it…Here are some of the ways in which I have used the beauties…

Summarising – starting with the largest post-it and gradually decreasing their size down the page.  The children can fit less and less wordage in each one, ending up with a few key points.

Feedback – stick them in exercise books so they are poking out pointing out where pupils need to do  corrections / feedback / wishes.  It makes it easy for you to see who needs to do corrections.  Pupils can remove the post-it when they have responded to feedback.

Guided Reading groups – I just use the sticky bits to write children’s names on and then laminate my group list.  This means I can really easily move my groups around.

Story timelines – use post-its to sequence the key elements in a story.  They can either be linked with arrows or stuck along a line.  The children can then play around with the story sequence or structure very easily.

Mind-mapping – I like to use pictures to stimulate descriptive writing, creating word banks to describe the mood.  I laminate my favourites and choose an appropriate one to stick in the middle of a large piece of sugar paper.  In groups, children mind-map words and phrases on post-its and organise them around the image.  I can then ask them to group their words and phrases under subheading.  These might end up being used as the basis for sentences or paragraphs.

Prepositions – saw this anchor chart and thought it looked brilliantly simple!

I also like this idea for apostrophes…

And this noticing punctuation…

Teaching onomatopoeia with speech bubble shaped post-its…

Organising sentence types…

This could also be done to classify words.

Classification and organisation of information for scientific or topic writing, creating keys and food chains.

Explanation texts – organise life cycles into a circular flow chart using post-its for each key point, drawing arrows in between.  Add notes on post-its at each key point.  These notes can then be moved and organised into paragraphs where they can then be expanded into full sentences under sub-headings.

Text marking – this will encourage close reading of texts.  It is really important to model how to do this first so children don’t spend too long sticking post-it notes in books.

AfL – use post-its to evidence learning in a lesson as an ‘exit slip’.

They make post-its in amazing shapes, sizes and colours…their uses are endless…and I love them!