The Felt board is your Friend!

Leftover from my teaching days, I suppose, comes my love of felt boards. Or maybe from enjoying seeing the Bible stories come alive as I sat in Sabbath School each week. But whatever it is from, I have to admit that I LOVE felt boards! No, they are not high tech. They do not pop or whistle or demand children's attention. But in their own way, they are wonderful teaching tools. Over my years homeschooling our son, I made two different felt boards, both from scraps of wood left over from a house project, covered with felt that I found at a thrift store. But now that we are basically starting homeschool all over again with our six year old, that old desire came back pretty strong--for a LARGE felt board! So. I warned my husband in advance. I checked out prices of felt and boards--I am admittedly a frugal person. And I scouted out the house for where I would put it, finally deciding that the play area in the basement would be perfect. Yes, it would cover up our Bible time line that is in progress, but I could always slide it over somewhere else when we wanted to focus more on the time line. Besides that--so far, our time line has not progressed very far downward on the wall, so for a while anyway the felt board would not be covering anything at all.

I actually found felt on sale at a fabric store before I had settled on what type of board I was going to place it on--therefore, I purchased enough felt to cover a 4 foot by 8 foot board (3 yards of felt). The cost of the felt (sale price) came to a bit under $15. It was a week or so later before I could get to the lumber store to survey their options for boards. I finally settled on this one that is very thin--only around 1/4 inch thick. I have covered plywood before, and it is wonderfully sturdy--but in a large board size, plywood was just too heavy for me to imagine moving it around by myself if I needed to get to the wall behind it. The only down side of this type of board is that the larger it is, the more it kind of wobbles--therefore my husband (probably very wisely) suggested that I have it cut to a 4 by 6 foot size. At the last minute--as the clerk was literally getting ready to cut it to size for me (out of a 4 x 8 sheet size), I cast out "Give me six more inches!" and had him cut it 4 x 6 1/2. I know he thought I was crazy, but hey--it was worth it because it gained me six more inches of felt board and you never know what you can do with that extra six inches! ;) This board was $12 at our lumber store.

So--I ended up having a bit extra felt that I had to cut off. If I had done this the "right" way of purchasing my board first, I would have known exactly how much felt I needed to buy. But hey, when it's on sale, you grab it! Besides that--I can always use the strip of felt I cut off in other projects.... But I could have shaved a couple dollars off my total project price if I had known at the start what size I was going to end up with. All I knew was "As big as I can get!"


Normally, tacky glue is a good way to go for gluing your felt down. If you are going to glue on the actual side of the board that you are going to be using, then I recommend rubber cement. Hot glue will hold well, but will also leave hard lumps, so it's fine if you are only gluing on the back side of your board, but you don't want to use it on the front. In keeping with my frugal self, I took inventory of what I already had and I had LOTS of regular school type glue I had purchased for one cent at the start of the school year--so I wondered if I could use that. I figured it didn't hurt to try, and the worst that could happen was that it wouldn't hold and I would have to reglue it with tacky glue. But might as well try. So that is what I used, though I wouldn't specifically buy this type of glue for this project--just using up what I already had. I used one complete bottle on each side of my board--but remember, I was gluing a 4 feet by six and a half feet board, so it took a lot!

I glued two sides, using clamps to hold it tight so it wouldn't slip. Then I let it dry overnight.

And finished the remaining two sides the next day, cutting off the extra felt at the corners. It's just like wrapping a present!

The new felt board was finished, just in time for Sabbath! So I couldn't resist putting up Jesus and the children, and a "Happy Sabbath" message. My daughter happily added a wise old owl sitting on top of the "T".

And now comes true confession time. My daughter and I both love the new felt board SO much that I started thinking of how I would absolutely LOVE to have it upstairs. We do 99% of our homeschooling upstairs, for a variety of reasons. First, in the winter time, it is definately warmer than down in the basement! And second, I am usually multi-tasking and doing dishes, cooking, or folding laundry while she does different homeschool assignments, so most of MY work is upstairs. Well, my wonderful husband not only agreed to let us move it upstairs, but actually encouraged me to do so. So guess what lives in my living room now? What can I say. My husband always did say that he lives in a "One house school-room!"

This picture shows our board being used for math class. Jesus is there because He is our teacher. My daughter is showing that she knows the amount that each number represents. Above that used to be the math problem 8 + 8 = 16, but we had to take the two "8"'s down to use down below later--and the large white thing is actually a piece of felt with the numbers 0-100 written on it, used for skip counting.

Well, hope this post has triggered some ideas for other homeschoolers. You may not want a felt board as a living room wall, but there ARE many fun and creative teaching things that a felt board can be used for! :)