Favorite Resource - Family Whiteboard

One very simple item to have around the house that makes it much easier to impart knowledge to your children is a whiteboard.  Or it could be a chalkboard.  In our early years when we lived in our old house, my husband painted chalkboard paint on the back of our kitchen door (that led outside).  This door was ugly as heck anyway.  It was the type that old louvered blinds in the middle of it, that the previous owners had put particle board over, I guess because it wasn't well insulated and let in a lot of cold air.  It was so ugly!  So we painted over it.  But as I started to homeschool I somehow got the bright idea to paint it in chalkboard paint.  This was so handy because we sat around our kitchen table a lot chatting.  We also had an old, old TV sitting in the corner and my kids would watch Sesame St. and Reading Rainbow and Barney there often.  My kids liked drawing on that painted chalkboard and I would write things up on that board.  Simple hang man, simple addition, etc.  It was nice to have a place to visually put things for everyone to see.

When we moved to this house we didn't have our chalkboard door.  I did begin to put things on our fridge and all around on our kitchen walls.  But we also bought an easel that had a whiteboard on one side and a chalkboard on the other.  This easel got so used over the years.  It is pretty battered now.  What was nice about the easel was it could move around.  When we sat out on our screen porch the easel came too and we could illustrate whatever we were talking about on it.  I used this whiteboard to casually teach math by putting a problem up an challenging the kids to solve it.  I'd write a paradigm in Latin, a quote, a spelling pattern, a helpful mnemonic device, some basic sentence diagramming, etc.  Whatever came up that I felt needed reinforcing.

For instance I would use the mnemonic device for the steps for long division:  Does MacDonald's Serve Cheeseburgers, with a simple long division problem to illustrate it.  At some point someone would notice it and a discussion would ensue or someone would put another problem up to see if it worked for another set of numbers too.

This is a bookmark to help kids remember the steps to long division.

We found we really liked writing with a whiteboard more than a chalkboard.  If we got the low odor markers.  I also was pretty diligent about keeping the markers up and away from the littles who might decide to decorate the walls with them.  My dysgraphic kids like standing to write more than sitting in a chair, so working at the whiteboard was a nice break.

Our whiteboard provided a way to strew, to communicate, to reinforce, to present material in another way.  Honestly, something so simple gave back so much.