TeacherBoss Hack: Making Cute Anchor Charts

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had anchor chart envy? (You can’t see me but my hand is up.) This is definitely a teacher problem that non-teachers would think is crazy. But I feel like a cute chart just makes me even more excited about my lesson.

Well, I don’t have perfect font-style handwriting, so I had to get crafty. I started hacking my anchor charts and I haven’t looked back!

I use the large, blank, sticky Post-it brand poster paper for most of my anchor charts. If your paper isn’t sticky, you just need a couple small pieces of tape. I stick my anchor chart to my SmartBoard and then pull up a PowerPoint document with my text already arranged how I want it. I resize the image until it fits perfectly on the paper that I stuck to my board, then I get out my Mr. Sketch and start tracing. Sometimes I’ll just trace the outline and then take it down and finish coloring it in.

I’m not able to install cute fonts on my work computer (even though I’ve sent multiple sweet emails asking for the ability to be able to, *eyeroll*), so I had to get creative. To solve this I either:

1. Create the layout how I want it on my computer at home, with all of my fonts. Then, I group the fonts, save as an image, and email to myself. At work, I just pull up the image and resize it to fit.

2. If I’m at work, I’ll go to DaFont.com. Once I find a font I like, I click on the “text preview”. It will let you type in a word or phrase to see how the text would look with that font. I screen shot the image in PowerPoint and use that to head my charts.

That’s it! Now go out and hack those charts!