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

K2 Printibles

Reagan Kinderbears Books of the Bible

Squidoo – links and more picture of other mini-offices.