Teacher Appreciation Gifts

If you’re here looking for the Festive Friday Blog Hop featuring my latest Christmas card design, just scroll down!

I’m taking part in Teacher Appreciation Week over at The Country Chic Cottage! Being a teacher myself I always try to come up with ideas of things to make as teacher appreciation gifts that I would have enjoyed receiving when I had a classroom.  Both of these ideas fit the bill.

For the first gift, I adapted an idea I used to have my Grade 8 students make as Mother’s Day gifts.

I  began with a small tin (about the size of a can of soup) that I found in the clearance section at Michaels.  In the past, I’ve made this with a clay flower pot instead.  I covered this using Mod Podge to adhere a piece of themed scrapbooking paper – another layer of Mod Podge on top helps seal and protect it.  Then I put a small piece of floral foam into the can to hold the pens or pencils in place.

To make the flowers, you’ll need some fake flowers and pens or pencils.  For the pens, I prefer the round stick type as they’re easiest to work with.  You’ll also need some kind of tape to hold the flowers onto the pens and cover the pens with to make them look like stems.

I’ve used floral tape before but here, I’m using green Duck Brand duct tape.  The kids I used to teach this to sometimes found it helpful to use a dab of hot glue to hold the flower in place before starting to wrap with the tape.

You can use some of the leaves from the flower stems and add them in as you’re taping.

Toss the caps from the pens and push them into the floral foam.  Here I added a few extra flowers (without pens or pencils) to fill out the arrangement.  I put some shredded paper into the can to cover the floral foam and fill in any gaps.  If you’re using a flower pot, you can substitute moss for the shredded paper.  You may want to use a bit of glue to hold it into place.  For one final touch, I added a couple mini clothespins – I knew this would come in handy for holding little reminder notes.  I glued them on but you could use magnets instead to make them removable/repositionable.  This is such a fun and decorative way of displaying a pen/pencil cup on the teacher’s desk!

For the next idea, I began with a chalkboard eraser from Dollarama.   My erasers were always disappearing from my classroom and a personalized one would have been so great!

I removed the paper label and then gave the wooden part of the eraser two coats of black paint to resemble a chalkboard.  I decorated it with some classroom themed stickers and symbols from scrapbooking paper – glued on and sealed with a top coat of Mod Podge.  I used alphabet stickers to personalize the eraser with the teacher’s name – again giving them a top coat of Mod Podge for protection.  Combine this with a bundle of coloured chalk (the fun coloured kind was always rare in the schools I worked at!) and you have a great little gift!  You could even add in a chalk holder – I always appreciated those because not only does the chalk get your hands all dirty but it’s very drying to your skin!

Be sure to head on over to The Country Chic Cottage for lots more great teacher appreciation gift ideas!