The Chalkboard Wall Success

January 19th, 2010

I decided not too long ago that I HAD to have a chalkboard wall.  Right in the middle of my dining room.  Hey, I’m embracing the learning happens everywhere philosophy.  We tried the school room approach: aschool nook first (which was great but not quite in the center of everything enough for me) and then into a separate school room (a converted bedroom) which was a complete disaster; it just never worked for us.  I even wrote a post for Heart of the Matter Online about how I homeschool with toddlers in the house.  Because with babies and toddlers life happens in the living areas and I need to be able to keep teaching in the midst of cooking, eating, feeding babies, changing diapers, and keeping an eye on little ones who happen to be learning from the Wonder Pets at the moment.

Here is our before wall.  Cute and all, but c’mon the word “melanin” barely fits on my wobbly chalkboard.

And here is our after.

My wonderful hubby painted this space with magnetic wall paint first.  This did not work so much for us.  We did only use two coats because that’s all we had.  And at $21.00 a little can, that’s all we were gonna do.  Not as important to me as the chalkboard.  If you do this, and it is important to you, maybe you could use many more coats and it would work for you.  I don’t know.

Then he put a couple of coats of the black chalkboard paint up and we waited 24 hours.  That was it.  One day later and I was teaching away!  I love instant gratification. 

If I had advice on this part though, we discussed that next time we’ll sand the wall down a bit and then lay a smoothing primer and then chalkboard paint it.  When I write it’s rather rough.  Which is fine for now, but we’ll know better next time.

Oh, and we extended it so low so that even the toddlers could write on the wall while I’m teaching.  The olders love playing hangman, tic-tac-toe, and just writing their names.  And I’m all for fitting in writing skills wherever I can!  Plus, you get to say things like, “No, BigMan, you can only write on the wall.”  And how fun is that?!