Bulletin Board: You Are Mine

It’s a new Adventurer year, and that means it’s time for…a new look in the church hallway! My club meets during the week. Other than the occasional mention in the bulletin and maybe a sighting during Adventurer Pathfinder Sabbath, the church doesn’t see our Adventurers, and we are a little too easy to forget. The bulletin board is my best tool to remind the church family that we exist, to inform them about what we are up to, and to get new families excited about joining.

This year’s bulletin board is based off the Adventurer theme for 2025-2026 in the Oregon Conference. Not from Oregon, but like the board? Awesome. You can just skip the theme-centric parts. (Or use them anyway. We love to share around here!) Wishing for something slightly different? Check out last year’s bulletin board and see if that fits your needs more.

Enjoy learning via video? Join me in my church basement while I transform the club’s bulletin board for the new year. I’ll show you my favorite tips to put this up fairly easily.

Bulletin Boards Come in Every Size – Fortunately these Printables Do Too.

Bulletin Boards come in such a huge range of sizes from the massive hallway board Adventurers has in the church next to the Sabbath School classrooms, to the small board hanging in my office (and even smaller). In an effort to be inclusive, and fit as many needs as possible, there are four sizes of bulletin board kits this year, and extra pieces to fill in the sides of our non-standard-size boards. (Do standard-size bulletin board even exist?)

The large size fits a very long board. Each letter prints on one 8 1/2 x 11 page. The medium kit is about half the size of the large – two letters fit on a page. The small kit is half the size of the medium with four letters per page. The mini size is for a 21 inch or larger bulletin board.

If you are using the theme words in the middle, and one of the smaller three board sizes, you might want to look at the theme pages in other kits – if you want to fill more of your board, size up. If you need more free space on your board, size down.

Pathfinders: Sometimes We Get to Work Together

I received a request from another director for an add-on to this bulletin board. Her church has a Pathfinder Club this year. (YAY for returning Pathfinder clubs!!) The Adventurer bulletin board now needs to be shared with the Pathfinder club. I adore seeing Pathfinders and Adventurers working together so much, I was happy to add some extra files to create a joint board. If your Adventurers and Pathfinders are sharing a bulletin board, you can skip the bottom border and add the Pathfinder border.

Printing and Preparing Your Bulletin Board

I printed everything on cardstock and laminated it as I want it to last all year. Laminating is optional, of course. (Note: If you are thinking about buying a laminator, I recommend Scotch. I purchased mine in 2011, and I still love it. Amazon thinks this one is the update to mine.)

Although the bottom borders and the large size banner letters are designed to be borderless, I strongly recommend you let your printer add that margin in. It printed much more accurately for me with the added margin, and I don’t think the whole top would have fit my bulletin board if it had been any larger! A paper trimmer is ideal for cutting the top and bottom boarders. I used my Silhouette cutting machine to cut the theme letters out, but everything can also be cut with scissors or a craft knife.

For the background, I purchased felt by the yard a few years ago. It still looks great and doesn’t show holes like bulletin board paper. It was challenging to hang as I attempted to use a random stapler at the church to staple it up, but I’ve since solved that issue, and the ongoing issue of stapling anything to the board by buying a small staple gun. With the correct tool, the board goes up fairly quickly. (At least in comparison!) I do make sure to keep this stapler on a high shelf out of the reach of our little adventurers.

Tips

I taped the border pieces together before stapling it to the bulletin board. If you have a large bulletin board like mine, a second set of hands is helpful. This year, I put it up by myself using lots of extra temporary painters tape. (You can see how in the video above.)

I used painters tape to position the letters and the little pieces. It took a few tries to get the letters centered and spaced properly. (I don’t know that I’d recommend this method on a bulletin board lined with paper..) Once everything was just so, I used my nifty stapler for some semi-permanence.

Artists

The original logo, that inspired this set of printables, and the graphics in the letter banners and borders were created by the endlessly creative Vanesa Franco, a fellow Area Coordinator in the Oregon Conference.

Adventurer Bulletin Board PDFs

Pathfinder Add-on PDFs

Cut Files for Silhouette

If you use one of these kits, could you leave a comment? I would be so delighted to hear from you. And if you any have suggestions for assembling a bulletin board, please leave a comment and share your knowledge. Our community is so much better when we work together and share our experience!