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I can’t believe it has taken me so long to blog about my Spanish class hat wall. After all, I’ve already moved to a new room and blogged about my new global luxe classroom style..

I first put up a hat wall in my Spanish classroom two years ago. I put the hat wall on a small wall between two windows to kind of serve as an accent wall. The Hubs help me put the hat wall together, and it took a lot of trial and error to get it the way I wanted it.

Forgive the cheesing Amy you see in the photo. I originally took this photo on the day I found out I had been selected to be a blog ambassador for National Geographic Kids. And, apparently, that is the only photo I ever took of my super fun hat wall in that room.

Some of the hats on the hat wall were from travels to Panama and Mexico. Others were simply purchased from places like Oriental Trading. It broke my heart to pull the hats down when I found out I was moving rooms after just one year in 831.

Installing the Hat Wall in my Middle School Classroom

My friend who is a Spanish/ESL teacher at the other middle school in my district came to help me reconstruct the hat wall in my new room. She loved the previous hat wall so much she convinced me to recreate the hat wall in my new room. It took us about three hours to get the hats on the wall as we wanted them. For one thing, we decided the smart thing to do was to play around with the layout of hats on the floor to find the arrangement that looked best before attaching anything to the wall. Secondly, we were working with terrible classroom cinder block wall. Cinder block walls hate me. Really, they do. We tried Command Strips, other brands of sticky stuff, etc. The hats kept falling down.

Another thing working against us was the fact that we are both super short 5-foot-tall people. It was a comedy with us trying to stand on chairs and lean over the mega huge bookcase. We had a hard time applying adequate pressure to the Command Strips. We finally had better luck with sticky Velcro strips.

Aside from a time or two later in the year when a hat fell, the Velcro strips worked extremely well. In fact, I used them again when decorating my new room.

While we’re here, let’s just take a little classroom tour of the rest of the room, shall we? This room was tricky one to set up because there were two doors and no windows. Weird.