Make Your Wall Work for You
Working your walls is a great compliment to your homeschool. Whatever you are learning, there is some amazing thing you can add to your wall to reinforce it. Beautiful visuals, simple word cards, or a list of primes all have a time and place to sit on your wall. Kids will accidentally look at stuff on the walls. Their curiosity will get the better of them and they will study it. If it is a list of something they are trying to memorize, having it on the wall will remind them to review it.
How do you get stuff on the wall without ruining your walls? I thought you would never ask, here are some of my favorite go-to-wall working essentials.
Magnetic Notes, except they aren’t magnets, they are static cling and will stick to your walls. They last a couple months before falling down. I use these for things like spelling words, squares, or anything else that fits and the kids will be working on for a week or more. They claim to be dry erase on one side, but I find that only to be true if you erase quickly, after a week the marker will be stuck on there, and if you wash it off, the water will undo the static clingy-ness so I just toss them when we are done.
I also use Command picture hanging strips. These come in different sizes, with the larger ones able to hold up more weight than the small ones. I have used these for posters, hanging up the kid’s artwork, and timelines. I have been using them for years and if you remove them properly, by pulling down steadily on the tab until the whole strip pops off the wall, they will not damage your wall. I have used them on both wallpaper and painted walls, flat and glossy, with no problems. (Except the time my teenager got impatient and pulled the strip up because he thought pulling the tab down wasn’t working because it takes at least three seconds to remove these strips. There is a bald spot on the wall where he did that.) These strips work like velcro, so you need a few for the wall, and a few for your poster.
This year I am trying a product called X Fasten Double Sided Tape it comes on a roll and you apply the sticky side to the poster, then pull off the paper strip on the back and mount to the wall. It claims to be removable, but since I am have not yet pulled anything down that I used it for I neither affirm or deny that claim. I will try to remember to update this post when I have completed the experiment. I can say it is strong stuff, as I used it to hang an entire large flag on the wall. And just a strip in the middle was enough to hold heavy-duty cards on the wall.
Sometimes you can hang something up just because it is pretty.
I also hang up schedules. Scheduling six kids is not simple. We have a corner of the hallway dedicated to organizing the chaos. For just a piece of paper, I use Scotch Removable Tape. Somehow we ended up with like 20 rolls, so I am not worried about how much I use. For dispensing this I highly recommend proper tape dispensers.
Work it in Wednesday - 5 Days of Homeschool Encouragement
Amanda @ Hopkins Homeschool
Angie @ Run Ran Family Adventures & Learning
Annette @ A Net in Time
Ashley @ Gift of Chaos
Betty @ Let’s Get Real
Brenda @ Counting Pinecones
Carol @ Home Sweet Life
Chareen @ Every Bed of Roses
