Laminating Tricks
It has taken me many years, and many hard lessons along the way, to pick up these few tricks about laminating! looking back, some are so obvious, yet I didn’t think of them until someone put me on a more efficient laminating path! So here are the directions to that path for you!
Did you know that you can laminate more than one sheet at a time?
No, they won’t stick together! Some laminating pouches come with a special slip – a cover to put the sheets in – but you can laminate more than one sheet at a time without it! Some laminators may not be strong enough for both sheets to come out to the same quality (I’ve had edges peel back off and air bubbles get trapped in sheets) but most of them work just fine! Give it a try – it might just cut your laminating time in half!
Glue and laminating pouches are best friends!!
When I first started teaching, you can imagine the amount of resources that I had printed and cut! I had them all nicely in their laminating pouches (being sure to have every possible bit of the pouches used up) ready to be laminated, before realising that I had left the laminator in school! So I was packing all my lovely laminating sheets, easily 100, into the car to go to school and laminate when a gust of wind caught hold of my stash! You can image the rest! Years later I discover glue, and nothing goes into a laminating pouch these days without a dab of glue to hold it in place! It also means that there is no more painful holding of tiny little pieces of paper to ensure that they don’t move just as they slip into the laminator and get laminated together!
Colour coding resources that are similar
I was forever getting similar resources mixed up! Loop cards, sets of letters, word families etc. all got mixed up until I had the idea of colour coding them. Back your resources onto a coloured piece of paper. When you laminate and cut them out each set will have a different coloured back and you will be able to group them together easily.
Cut, Laminate & Cut Again!
If you are laminating something that is not a whole A4 page, you will create a resource that will last much longer if you cut the resource out first, laminate it, and then trim the laminated resource (being careful not to cut all the way to the edge of the paper – you need to leave a laminated seal). If you laminate without trimming your resource first, when you cut it out after laminating there will be no seal to keep the laminating sheet together and your resource will peal!
Does it take more time? Yes! Do the resources last longer? Yes! Will it hugely reduce your changes of having to do the same job twice? Absolutely!
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