I really admire those parents who plan and buy these awesome end of year teacher gifts super early and don’t get themselves in the big end of year rush! To be honest, I’m the total opposite of these parents. I’ve just realized my daughter has 2 weeks left of kindergarten this year! It’s now too late to order anything and our wallets are already feeling the Christmas squeeze, but I also wanted my daughter to gift something that was different from a box of chocolates and something that would make her teachers think of her whenever they looked at it.
Any one teacher can be given up to 30 presents at the end of each year, and when you think about it, that’s a lot of little things for someone to hold onto year after year to remember every single child they’ve taught. It’s actually a lot harder than one would think to find a gift that represents the gratitude we have for our children’s teachers but also one that considers the fact a person can’t be expected to hold onto every little thing for 20 years.
So we sat down and brainstormed and came up with two items we could gift together. One can be kept and won’t take up much room and the other is a nice little twist on a box of chocolates.
1. DIY Jar of goodness
This is such a simple gift but it’s also personal and your kids will have a ball making it with you! Making the jar was so much fun that we actually made a few more for our elderly neighbours and it just made their day when the kids knocked on their doors with the jars.
To make the jar:
Materials:
- Empty Container ( we used an empty wafer tub)
- Christmas paper
- Cellophane
- Twine
- Tape
Method:
- Nicely wrap your container in the Christmas paper and tape it on
- Make your cookies to go inside (we used a mix of home baked cookies and DIY iced biscuits)
- Wrap the cellophane around your jar and tie with twine
DIY Iced Biscuits
Method:
- Mix up your icing and divide for different colours
- Use food dye to colour your icing
- Cover your biscuit in your desired colour
- Use 2 tiny teddies as the reindeer antlers
- Choose and cut your preferred lollies to make your reindeer’s face
2. Certificate Of Thanks
This cute little idea is a way for your child (or you) to express their gratitude into words for their teacher. The little touch of adding photos from their first day of the school year to their very latest school photo, along with their names and a date will be easy enough for your teacher to put away to keep and remember them by. I also added in a box for my daughter to write her name into before I laminate them to hand out. (The grey rectangle areas and teachers name are only there for privacy reasons and for the purpose of this blog). You can use any type of program to do this yourself like paint, Photoshop etc but the website I used is Canva.
So as you can see there are a lot of options to choose from, but I think our two gifts for this year really wound in well with what we were trying to achieve. Let us know in the comments some of your ideas for teacher gifts this year.
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