Sunday, August 3, 2008

Educational Placemats

I keep placemats on our kitchen table. I have a collection of seasonal ones, educational ones, and nice ones that we use for company. I have collected the educational ones over the years from museum gift shops, homeschool supply catalogs, and WalMart. My children enjoy making up games and quizzing each other using the information found on the placemats. We learn math facts, world and U.S, geography, U.S. history, science and preschool concepts while dining.
Recently while shopping at our local teacher supply store I saw so many bulletin board cutouts and posters that I wanted to display in our schoolroom, but I knew that my wall space was limited. Then I had an idea! I could cut the posters and cutouts, laminate them and make them into placemats! The posters cost $2.50 each, and I made 2-4 placemats out of each poster. The largest sheets my laminator can accomodate are 12x15, so I cut down my large white cardstock sheets (bought at Staples--100 in a package--12x17) to fit the laminator sheets. Then I used scrapbooking double sided tape to attach the things I had cut out onto the cardstock and laminated it to make a placemat. I made about 30! The new placemats include times tables, Spanish color words, Spanish number words to 100, Spanish shape words, election terms and their definitions, states and capitals, parts of speech, punctuation, preschool shapes, ABCs, colors, and contractions. For some of the placemats I used flashcards, 8 per placemat.

2 comments:

  1. This is so funny because I do the opposite. I have limited wall space so I use educational place mats as posters. :)

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  2. This is a very short description of educational placemats. Please try to elaborate the article and share some pictures of toddlers placemats.

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