teacher appreciation + cheat sheets

teacher appreciation

It's teacher appreciation week!  We wrote our thank-yous this weekend and potted some pretty annuals for our favorite teachers...

The cards are my favorite.  I hope the teachers like them...

"cheat sheets"

Sarah's been asking me to do this post for a while and I figured that this is a perfect time to do it with teacher appreciation and end-of-year gifts right on top of us.

At the beginning of the school year I sent this letter to Colin and Ty's teachers...  

It's basically a little, informative letter about the boys.  I don't know if you can read it very well in this picture but it tells the teachers their name, birthday, who's in their family, and about some of their favorite things.  Then enclosed with that letter is another sheet....

This asks the teacher to fill out information about themselves and return it to the student.  It asks for their birthday and some of their favorite things like favorite food, color, magazine, snacks, store where they like to shop, activities, hot drink, and cold drink...just to name a few.  Then I stash it here...

in the family "owners manual" {idea from the lovely and talented Sarah } where it remains until I need to shower the teacher with a treat. 

I appreciate {so much} the job that teachers do.  They deserve, in my opinion, some royal pampering for putting up with our little darlings all year.  I like to acknowledge their birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah, teacher appreciation and end-of-year.  Sometimes if they have something special going on I acknowledge that as well.  This year Colin's teacher got married and one of Ty's teachers became a grandma.  Colin's teacher likes to scrapbook, so I gave her some wedding rub-ons.  For Ty's teacher, I made a "brag book" out of one of those cheapo photo books you can get for a dollar, the ones they used to give you for free when you developed a roll of film...back in the dark ages.   Birthdays are nothing more than their favorite drink, snack and candy...for Thanksgiving I got a bouquet from Costco and turned it into two bouquets with tags that read "thankful" for the pre-school teachers {Colin was too embarrassed to take his teacher a bouquet}.  I do spend a little more for holidays and end-of-year gifts, but I'm talking a $10 gift card to their favorite store for Christmas/Hanukkah and maybe $20 for end-of-year.  Although, with two kids in school now I'm really thinking next year the holiday gifts will be much less...just a little thought...

So, that's how I do the whole teacher gift thing.  The letter makes it really easy to treat the teachers throughout the year to some of their favorite things.  I should work on making one for my husband :).

Enjoy your week...