Pretty Letters!

Before you buy pretty bulletin board letters, read this and make your own! Now is the time of year when we are all thinking about our classroom set-ups and back to school bulletin boards. Today, I am going to show you how to spruce up your classroom without spending a fortune!

A couple of weeks ago, I showed you how to fill in frames with pictures. (Click here for that post.) Today, we are going to use a similar technique to fill in letters.

1.  Open PowerPoint.
2.  Click on Home, Layout, and Blank to clear the background.
3.  Click on Insert, WordArt, and chose the first or second option (it will look like an A).
4.  It should now say, "Your text here."  Type your title, or individual letters to cut out.  In my example, I typed MATH.
5.  Highlight the letters. (If you forget to highlight, nothing will happen.) From here, you can click "Format" and make some changes, but you will have a lot more options by right clicking.
6.  After you right click, you should notice an option to change the font and size.  If you are printing individual letters, you may want to increase the size to 300 or more.
7.  While the letters are still highlighted, right click, and choose "Format Text Effects."  You can now change the color of the outline, add or get rid of the shadow, and choose your text fill.
8.  Click on Text Fill, then Picture or Texture Fill.
9.  Choose either Clip Art or File.  I chose File and added a Thistle Girl background that I had.  I also changed the outline to red by clicking on Text Outline.

Here is another example, where I changed the font size to 225, added a ladybug background from Pixel Paper Prints, and inserted a three inch square and a smaller one inside to make a frame.

I can use these letters to make titles on bulletin boards, label book baskets, make a Boggle Board, etc. There are so many possibilities!

Go play around with this...try some backgrounds that you might already have or some PowerPoint clip art, and add some color to your classroom! Enjoy!!

~Ella Jane