End-of-the-year gifts for teachers

At the end of each school year we like to do something nice to thank our wonderful teachers for teaching and loving our children during the year.

I used to spend ample amounts of time researching cute gift basket ideas for the teachers and have done a movie gift basket with popcorn, candy and a movie gift certificate and a summer gift basket using a sand pail, sunscreen, snacks, and a book store gift certificate.

As you can see most of my ideas involve gift certificates. I figure teachers appreciate something they can choose themselves but always tried to find a unique way to present it. The problem was, I was spending so much money on the filler gifts that I wasn't able to spend much on the actual gift certificate.

So this is what I decided to do for our five teachers this year - a gift certificate from our local Chamber of Commerce. The great thing about this gift certificate is that they can choose to shop from a list of local stores and restaurants including a local book store, pet store, Wal-Mart, nail salon, etc. So basically they can buy whatever they want with it and it is supporting our local commerce here in Lexington.

As you can see, I didn't do anything "cutesy" to present them, so that I could spend more money on each individual gift certificate. I did however buy a pack of cute scrapbooking paper to wrap them up in instead of just presenting a plain envelope.

Then I wrote a message to each teacher and had each child draw or write something special for their teachers.

You can see one of Emma's drawings above. The teachers seemed to appreciate them so this is now my standard end-of-the-year gift. At least for this year. Maybe next year I will feel much more creative!