Ideas for Teacher Appreciation Week

Teacher Appreciation Week takes place (at least in the US) during the first full week of May. I am a HUGE FAN of teachers, especially my kids' teachers. Here's what we're doing for our teachers this year for Teacher Appreciation Week. 

This year, we have a LOT of teachers to appreciate! 

For Froot Loop, we have his main classroom kindergarten teacher, and we will also make a gift bag for the other two kinder teachers since they work together for recesses, lunch, special events, and more. Plus, they're awesome and deserve to be appreciated as well. 

Count so far: 3

We also have Froot Loop's Speech Therapist, Occupational Therapist, and PPCD teachers... while he is phasing out of these needs and his IEP was updated during his ARD, I owe these three EVERYTHING for helping get Froot Loop above and beyond where he should be in these areas. I mean it. Froot Loop would not be the amazing kid and student he is today without these wonderful women. 

Count so far: 6 

Froot Loop also wanted to appreciate his "specials" teachers for art, music, and P.E., which is an awesome idea! They should be appreciated as well! So many times, these teachers get "passed over" because our kiddos don't see them every day. In fact, these teachers see more kids than pretty much everyone else (except maybe the lunch ladies, who are amazingly awesome too!)

Count so far: 9 

While you could include awesome people such as the school nurse, librarian, computer lab monitor, secretaries, and principal, we do already participate in their special days too, so we make them just a little appreciation package during this week too. Froot Loop picked out a really pretty whirligig for each of these people. I didn't want to leave them out during this week. 

Count so far: 9, plus 6 extras. 

FINALLY, we have Cocoa Puff's three preschool teachers, and even though he only has preschool 2 days a week, these three ladies are absolutely AMAZING and gotten Cocoa Puff ready for pre-kindergarten next fall! I can't believe it... both of my boys will be in school next year! 

Count so far: 12, plus 6 extras! 

For the basket, I found some really cute little square baskets at Dollar Tree. They are working well for all the things I am putting in them. 

Most of the teachers are getting a little flower lollipop bouquet. There's a few of our teachers who don't eat sweets or otherwise wouldn't enjoy them as much, so I'm giving them extras of the other things. 

Each teacher is also getting a planner band. My vision for these are to be used to hold manilla file folders closed or gradebooks or notebooks, or whatever! I'm giving our kinder teacher a few extras because I've seen her needs in my days as classroom mom and I think she'd really like a bunch of these to keep her papers and files together. 

All of my larger gift boxes have post-it notes, a few pens, staples, paperclips, binder clips, rubber bands, etc. I also am putting in some of these really cute decorative paper clips. 

Also for our kinder teacher, we picked out lots of extra school supplies like extra plain colored paperclips, a stapler, some magnetic clips, etc. She's also getting a small discbound notebook that I'm putting together for her. 

Froot Loop had a lot of fun picking out the large sticky notes for each of his teachers, and he also went ahead and guessed at what Cocoa Puff's teachers would want. He figured grownups like coffee so that would be okay for everyone. 

I really hope the teachers enjoy them. I know that our teachers end up having to pay for a lot of their supplies out of pocket, so I was hoping that this would help offset some of that for them, since teachers go through supplies like crazy and are sometimes (usually?!) given only a set amount of supplies for the whole year. 

Finally, our Parent-Teacher Organization Chair asked a bunch of us in the community who had small businesses/Etsy Shops/etc. if we'd make some things to donate toward some teacher appreciation gift baskets for the week. I am totally on board! I made a bunch of the decorative paper clips for it, as well as a handful of the elastic planner bands. I am also giving a few of my Key Fobs/Lanyards as "runner up" gifts. The big item from me is going to be a Fabric Banner made out of fabrics in our school colors! 

I am pretty excited about these, and I had a lot of fun putting them together. I LOVE our teachers and one week a year definitely isn't enough to appreciate them! 

How do you celebrate Teacher Appreciation?