Teachers: How to Use Custom Sticky Notes in the Classroom

Sticky notes are wonderful teaching tools. They’re low-cost, easily adaptable, and can be used in lesson plans for just about every subject. From unique art projects to interactive math problems, sticky notes are great for spicing up lesson plans and keeping students engaged.

Yet, teachers can take those standard sticky notes a step further by creating customized notes that are built for your unique needs. One custom sticky note design that’s ideal for teachers: Tiny personalized letterheads. Choose a notebook paper background and add a stylized “From Mr/Ms…” and you can write personalized notes to your students. But that’s just a small example. Here are a few more ideas:

1. Flash Fiction Templates

Writing flash fiction is a great exercise for students. It requires them to consider what makes a story and organize their ideas into brief snippets. Sticky notes are a great medium for these tiny stories. Plus, you can create custom sticky note templates by adding title and bylines at the top.

2. Sentence Diagrams

Diagramming sentences is something we all remember from grade school and sticky notes are the perfect tool for students get started. One strategy you can use: Write out each word of a sentence on a separate sticky note and have young students arrange them into sentences. Plus, you can customize your sticky notes using different colors or designs for different parts of speech.

3. Whiteboard Bar Graphs

Here’s an idea for interactive graphs: Draw the X and Y on the whiteboard or chalkboard and use different colored sticky notes to fill in the data. You use this in math lessons, mock elections, or plotting every student’s birthday by month.

4. Visualizing Fractions

One reason sticky notes are great for learning fractions: They’re perfect squares. To visualize fractions, use two different colored notes. You can quickly cut one color into ideal fractions like 1/2 and 1/4, and then place them over the top of the other color to visualize the fractions.

5. Collaborative Bulletin Boards

There are a number of examples of sticky notes being used to create larger images, like the Mona Lisa, classic Nintendo characters, and celebrity portraits. Have your class create a bulletin board sized collage or image using different colored sticky notes. It’s bound to stick out in the hallways.

6. Storytelling Flipbooks

Flipbooks are a fun, engaging arts project. Have students tell a story by creating a flipbook out of a sticky note pad. You can customize the pad too to include a title page and page numbers, then let your students put their creativity to work.

7. Foreign Language Labels

When learning a foreign language, it can be very beneficial to add labels to everyday items in the room. For example, the computer paper stack might say “papel” if the class was learning Spanish. Sticky notes are great for this because they can be easily removed and don’t make a mess.

8. Easy Annotation

Sticky notes are a valuable tool for annotating literature and textbooks. When assigning reading, have students mark their thoughts at particular passages that interested them. Ask them to write down what they were thinking at the time. Your students will be more prepared during in-class discussion.

9. Story Mapping

Depending on the age of your students, story maps can be useful for diagramming and organizing the parts of a story. With younger students, create a bar graph on the board with categories like characters, problems, settings, and phrases. Afterward, have students draw pictures to add to the graph.

10. Idea Tree Mapping

Mind mapping is a powerful in-class exercise for understanding and organizing thoughts. Essentially, you are made by putting a main idea in the middle of the plot (whether on the whiteboard or piece of construction paper) with different branches representing subtopics. Each sub-topic has leaves attached to it. Custom sticky notes in the shape of leaves are great for creative idea trees.

11. Opinion Graphing

Do you want to gauge student opinion about a specific subject? An opinion graph is the perfect solution. You can accomplish this by adding two polar opposites at the side of the graph: “I like the book” and “I didn’t like the book” for example. Then have students add their sticky note to the spot on the graph that corresponds to their opinion.

These are just a few examples of sticky notes as teaching tools. There are hundreds more, but hopefully these get the creative lesson planning juices flowing. How do you use sticky notes in your classroom?