Finding creative ways to say thank you

Every year, as we reach the end of April, I start the arduous task of trying to figure out what to make the teachers for end of the year gifts. It's especially difficult in years like this year when a younger child has the same teacher as an older child, so you have to be careful not to duplicate gifts you made in the past (as if I can even remember what I did!). It's so important to me to thank our teachers, though, because they work so hard and get paid so little all to deal with children all day long (and adults who act like children after that). My kids have been blessed to have great teachers minus an exception or two, pretty successful when you consider that they've had 14 different teachers. This year, we had two female teachers and a male teacher. Most of the time I'm able to make the same thing for each of the teachers, but I didn't think our male teacher would really dig the gift I made for the female teachers, so I made him something different. This was the gift for the female teachers:

 I found cute little pails in the dollar section, filled them with beans and wrapped some ribbon around it. Since the pails were slippery and tapered, I added some hot glue to make sure they didn't move.

 Then I took some stick pens and wrapped them with green patterned paper (you could use card stock, but it's so thick, you would really have to roll the paper on the edge of a table a lot before you wrapped it around the pen to get a nice curve instead of creases). For this part, the thinner the paper is, the easier it is to get it to curve nicely. After that, I made the flowers. They are an origami fold called Kusudama and you can google a tutorial for them, I found that it was helpful to use both a picture tutorial and video tutorial, especially when I got stuck on one part and couldn't figure out what the picture was trying to show.

 After I was done with the flowers, I had to cut the bottom off each so that I had something flat to glue to the top of the pen. I hot glued the flowers to the top, and then I stuck a pen through the middle of a purchased paper flower and pulled it up to sit at the base of the folded flower. Then I glued up the petals and wrapped a little ribbon around the bottom to clean it up a little. Finally, I added some glitter glue to the petals of the flowers to give them a little bling. To give credit where it's due, I found this project on another blog here and used this picture tutorial for the flowers here (I don't have a link to the video tutorial I used, I just found it by searching).

 For the male teacher, I liked this project for the simplicity (especially after folding all those flowers), and I thought it would be useful as well. I was able to use some rub ons I had on hand, and stamped his name, kind of making it look like a chalk board.

 

The pencils are held together by a cup in the middle. Try to find a cup that has sides as straight as possible. The gaps in the pencils at the top are due to the tapering of the cup, so even though I thought I had really succeeded at finding a straight cup, it highlighted how wrong I was.

I tried to think of a quick but cute design for the gift bags, and I thought they turned out good, and they were super quick to make.

                                                                        

 

The cards came from a project I'm working on with my scraps, I have three different cards with the same design, just a different rub on for each and I let the kids choose which ones they wanted to use. 

I know they are really simple in design, but I made them entirely out of scraps (well, except for the card base), I would even include the rub ons as scraps because they were left over from another project a long time ago, so it was nice to be able to use them here.

I also decided to include a small gift card for each teacher, that way they can get something useful in addition to something cute. I hope the teachers like them and know how much we appreciate their hard work with my kiddos throughout the year.