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Welcome to Mini Office 101 (aka “what I’ve been busy putting together this last week”). It’s seriously easy – it just might take a little time on your part, but I promise this is a simple thing to do at night while watching your favorite tv show, or maybe your husband folding laundry. :)
What’s a mini-office, you ask? Essentially it’s a one-stop place for all those essentials that the kids might need while working on their school work. They can prop it up and find quick answers to some of their common questions.
Materials needed:
- 1-5 office file folders (depends on how big you want it to be)
- worksheets you’ve printed off or created
- glue sticks
- contact paper (I took mine to a local teaching store and had all four I made laminated for around $6).
Putting it all together:
- Glue your file folders together side by side, overlapping one side of each. Be sure that the folders can still fold up inside each other (i.e. don’t put them together too closely).
- Print off the worksheets and things that you want to put into your office and place them where you want them. I had one side more focused on reading/writing things and the other one more math/science/geography related.
- Glue your charts and worksheets in with glue sticks and laminate.
This last week I made three different lapbooks (and one for a friend who is beginning to homeschool this year). Zachary’s Preschool mini office was a fairly simple one that used only one file folder. His “office” has the following information in it:
- Left/Right hands
- Shapes
- Paper money and coins
- Months of the year
- Colors and color words
- Counting to 20 and number words
- Alphabet chart
- Short and Long vowels
McKenna and Laurianna’s mini offices used a total of four file folders, glued back to back and it all folds up nicely into the size of one folder. Theirs are fairly similar, differing only on their addition/subtraction or multiplication/division charts and a few language items. Their mini offices include the following:
- Books of the Old/New Testament
- Cursive chart
- Writing checklist
- Short/long vowels
- World map and continents/ocean song words
- Fraction circles
- Coin and paper currency charts
- Math symbols & words
- Number chart: includes roman numerals, ordinal numbers and skip counting by 2’s, 3’s, etc…
- Telling time along with time words
- “Gallon Man” – cups, pints, quarts, gallon
- Thermometer
- Punctuation
- Story words: beginning, middle, and ending examples
- Numbers words in English and Spanish
- Number chart to 100
- Shapes, colors, days of week, months, US map
If you would like to make you own mini office, I’ve included some great links to various sites where you can download some worksheets to use in your own mini office. I created a few worksheets of my own and they are available as a pdf file to download them for your own use. 
Coin chart Left/Right Hands Busy Teachers Cafe a little bit of everthing
Reagan Kinderbears Books of the Bible
Squidoo – links and more picture of other mini-offices.
The printables shared on this site are FREE of charge unless otherwise noted, and you are welcome to download them for your personal and/or classroom use only. However, free or purchased printables are NOT to be reproduced, hosted, sold, shared, or stored on any other website or electronic retrieval system (such as Scribd or Google docs). My printables are copyright protected and I appreciate your help in keeping them that way.
If you download and use some of my printables and then blog about them, please provide a link back to my blog and let me know - I'd love to see how you are using them! Please be sure to link to the blog post or web page and not directly to the file itself. Thank you!
I have enjoyed reading your blog today! I am starting Galloping the Globe with my 1st and 3rd graders this year (I also have a 6th grader.) I happened upon your blog when I searched GtG in google. I also love to implement Mini Office Lapbooks for our homeschool. Last year was the first year I made them and they were a big hit. I am now planning out this years Mini Office lapbooks. I’ll stop back in sometime.
~Have a blessed day.
~Rhonda
I love this. Very cool!
Lisa
from HSS
Ok, Ok, this may be the coolest thing ever. My 13 yr. old is adopted internationally, and English is her second language, it just occurred to me that putting something like this together would be SO helpful to her.
I’m totally impressed!!!
Incredible post — how-tos, pictures, and freebies. What more could anyone ask for ?
I’ve linked to this on my Mini-offices page!
Your mini-offices are awesome! You did a wonderful job on these! Thanks for the great post and all the links.
Sara
What a great idea! Thanks so much.
You have so many amazing and organized ideas! I am gleaning so much from you! Thank you!
Annie
You’re brilliant! LOL! I have been homeschooling for about 10 years, lapbooking for the last few, and I have never heard of such a thing! I feel so old ;)
nah…not old. :) not at all!! Just focusing on other things!! :)
I just found your site! What a resource! Thx! =]
what a great project for my daughter to do.
LOOOVE This!!!
I was just thinking yesterday I wanted to make something like this. Your website is one of my favorites for ideas to help our school day….thank you!
so glad it helped out. :)
So sad, but I guess expected. As of now most of these links are no longer active. Alas. I’ll have to figure out another way to make something similar for preschool.
hoping I can pull a little something together on my own!! And I’ll share the files too! :)
Woohoo! (Like the new pic too, btw!)
I love this mini office idea. I would also love to do this for my high school kids. Do you happen to have the links or maybe know where I could find links to get the printouts to help my children and their learning?
I love this idea, but none of the links are working?
Hmmm. A few of them aren’t working, but I was able to click over to three of them. Some of the sites must have closed.