AAS Letter Tiles Mini Office UPDATE

Last year I made a Letter Tiles "Mini Office" for All About Spelling, and after using it for most of the year, I'm tweaking it.

Previously I used magnet strips.  I really wanted to use a full-page magnet, but had trouble finding them, and when I did they were not powerful enough to hold the magnets.  I have seen magnet folder-books for storing die-cuts online, but I haven't been able to see one in person to determine whether they would be strong enough to hold the magnets, or large enough to hold the system.

This year I found that Walmart has some hanging tins on sale for 97 cents (in the craft/office supplies area).  They are about 9" X 11" or so.  They work great!

The tiles stick to these better than to the magnet strips, and I never have any fall off.  For now, I simply glued five small magnet strips onto the folders to hold on the tin signs.  I may decide to glue the whole page down though, I haven't decided yet.

Here's the whole system:

This is actually about half a foot shorter than my previous system, another bonus. You may notice that there are more tiles than ever now.  My oldest is in Level 7!  That level includes extra prefixes and suffixes...

...another Advanced Phonogram...

 plus a whole page full of Greek and Latin Root tiles:

I opted to put these in a separate folder & will pull them out when my oldest uses them, rather than add a 5th panel.  We may even just build on the bottom of this little board since there's room and it's easy to hold.

The signs at Walmart come decorated and with ribbon hangers--here is the front:

I opted to use the back since the patterned backgrounds are too busy to use with the tiles.

The back does have some small print on it, but most of the time this is covered up by tiles and not overly distracting.

I still think that the large, recommended magnet-board is the easiest to use, but if you have limited space or take school on the go, this is a good second option.  You can use this with either All About Spelling or All About Reading (or both).  My kids are older now and don't use the tiles as much, so we like to be able to fold up the tiles and put them away.  I can keep it right in my AAS box.  We generally either lay it on our laps or lay it out on the coffee table in front of us.  A lap version really needs sturdier pages than the folders...which is the thing that makes me want to glue down the tins rather than just attaching them to the folder with magnets.

Happy Reading & Spelling!