Most homeschoolers would LOVE to have a wall map for use in their homeschool geography or as I more commonly use it in our homeschool history. It’s an integral part of our lessons I pull out at least once a month. But wall maps are expensive, and most of us don’t have that in our budget. Here’s a complete how-to-make-your-own wall map tutorial, a nice basic homeschool how to.
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Easy lazy way to make a wall map
If you have a little bit of money you could print out one of your Wondermaps* and take it down to Office Max and have them enlarge it to whatever size you want, but that can also easily get expensive.
So, here’s what I did.
Less expensive way to make a wall map for your homeschool
First head to print world maps, there you can pick your page template size. I go with 3 by 3 for most projects that is big enough to get a fairly good idea of what’s going on, and I can chain them together for some of our history projects (like Leif Ericson discovering America). If you’re ambitious you can print it out much larger.
Now that you’ve printed it out, put together the giant puzzle. I use glue stick
Once your brand-new wall map is all glued together I recommend coloring it somehow. I love the look of using Watercolor Pencils
Then I run over it with a wet brush, and it gives a nice dappled effect that makes it look antique, which amuses me.
This step is optional, but it saves me having to remake the maps each time I want to use them (which is indispensable), but laminate them. I go down to Mardel which has the best prices locally, but many teacher supply stores have decent prices. I do not recommend Office Max or Depot, both of them have terrible prices.
Laminating is another reason I do not print bigger than 3×3, it still fits in the laminator, but you can make workarounds for if you want to make a bigger map.
Oh, and another benefit of the map being laminated you can write on them with Vis-A-Vis Wet-Erase Markers
Wondering what you can do with a wall map like this?
- How did World War 1 start?
- How did World War 2 start?
- The discovery of Iceland
- Missionary Journeys of Paul
And that’s only scratching the surface of what you can do.
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