Laminating posters at home

A friend of mine recently showed me how to laminate at home without a laminating machine.  She uses a simple hot-iron, and it works beautifully for posters, lap-booking, small manipulatives, and anything else that you might want to laminate.  She buys a big roll of THERMAL laminate, like the one pictured here from amazon.com, and irons it, as shown in the video.

Another project I did with this laminate is to make magnets for the kids to play with.  I printed out a tangram and laminated one side with the hot iron.  Then I placed it on a sticker-magnet and cut it out, and the kids had magnetic tangrams to play with on a couple of cookie sheets that I bought at a second-hand store.  Unfortunately the printer did some automatic sizing that made the tangrams be too small for our tangram puzzles.

We also got a free phone-book the bay before our trip, which had a free magnet advertisement on it.  It was actually the perfect size for tangrams, and fits snug in our tangram puzzles.  The only problem is that I got too hasty and put the parallelogram on the wrong side.  :p

I also forgot to take a picture before our trip, and so a triangle is missing, and in the tangram I printed, my baby sucked on the red triangle at the bottom.  Well, now you know that we're human, but I'd still rather share the picture.  :o)

I also like to laminate with my laminating machine shown in the video.  I buy 200 8.5"-11" sheets for $20 at Sam's Club, sized perfectly for printouts.  The sheets are thicker and come out looking more professional than the homemade laminate does.  However, I usually don't need professional, I just need durable, and the hot iron does the job at a much lower cost.  I also LOVE not having to go to the craft store to do posters.  The last time I did that with three little kids there was a lot of chaos.  Never again!

Have fun laminating!  If you homeschool and have never laminated before, I HIGHLY recommend it!