Teacher Appreciation Week 2020 (Free Printables)

What do you do when you don’t have a theme for Teacher Appreciation Week?

That is the question that hit us when we started planning our Teacher Appreciation Week. To be clear at our school we do ‘Staff’ Appreciation week because we also honor and appreciate the in-class attendants, lunch monitors, therapists, daycare staff, administration, librarian and janitorial staff.

The reality is that it was my sons last year of elementary school and my 6th year helping in some way with the Appreciation Week. It appeared that all the ‘good’ themes out there had already been done. We decided this year the theme would be ‘APPRECIATION’. We would spend more time on doing for teachers and staff rather than on matching graphics and decor

First Step – Recruit the PPO

This year we focused on ensuring we stayed in budget, while giving the teachers an amazing week. Last year we had parents comment how they are not able to commit to being a member of the PPO (Parent Participation Organization), or volunteering all year but they would like to do something for Staff Appreciation Week. So, the first thing we did was reach out to the PPO and the ENTIRE school to let parents know what we were doing and how they could help. This email ‘ask’ also helped make parents aware that Staff Appreciation week was taking place. We were overwhelmed with the support. We had 80% of PPO contribute something for our PPO potluck, volunteer time or help set-up andrun the week. The parents made snacks, offered prizes for a draw and offered their time too.

Letter to Parents (pdf)

To support this we also sent out an email to parents encouraging them to get their kids involved with Staff week by writing a note of appreciation to teachers.

So How do you Plan a Week Without a Theme?

Instead of trying to make the entire week a theme, we focused on a theme for every day! Administration informed us early on that the staff all REALLY like having food during staff week. So, we put a focus this year on providing food and making sure the entire staff feels pampered.

DÉCOR

The previous years I worked with an amazing person who sets up sweet tables and does staging as her job. Her kids moved onto highschool and I don’t have those skills, but we tried! We did however have an amazing graphics guy who had no choice but to volunteer his time and do our biding… spoiler: it’s my husband. But wow did he deliver! We realized that even without a theme, if you have cute taglines and amazing graphics it doesn’t really matter. He created a poster with theme of ‘We Think The World of You’. Even the logo he created was multicultural and had the schools pink anti-bullying shirt and school uniform colors included.

ADD jpg LOGO

We created posters for each entrance into the school (the main office and the daycare office), posters with the logo to decorate the school, a schedule to inform teachers of what was going on and beautiful tags, which I feel ‘made’ the gifts.

One of my favorite and inexpensive gifts for staff was an individual poster. We put them up the Friday after staff had left. This meant that the Monday morning they came in to start the Staff Appreciation Week they were greeted with a poster telling them we appreciate them. It was cool later when we went in and saw many had laminated their posters so they last longer!

In an effort to keep the focus on the teachers our backdrop for the food table was photos of the entire staff! This was creative, inexpensive and it gave a feeling of inclusion for all staff.

Appreciation Station

Being a believer in positive mindset and mindfulness, we wanted to offer positive ‘teacher-focused’ quotes in an ‘Appreciation Station’. We found Purple Pronto Pups who had great ideas for Give and Take boards. For our Appreciation Station we focused on Positive quotes for Confidence, Faith, Hope, Humility, Kindness, Love, Patience, Peace and Self-Control.

And the week begins…

MONDAY: You Are The ‘KEY’ to our Kids Success

Gift: We wanted to start with something fun and practical. We decided a keychain that also doubles as a bottle opener would be good and found them on amazon. We debated between using wire or chain and a metal wiring. The chain was the easiest and affordable and we were happy we did because it looked much better!

Snack: On Monday the administration wanted to offer a lunch to teachers, so we were relegated only giving them a snack, and not too big of one so they wouldn’t spoil their appetite. We had fresh coffee and pastries in the staff lounge as they arrived.

TUESDAY: Let’s ‘FACE’ it You Are Awesome

Gift: Teaching can be stressful so we chose to give them a soothing face mask to help hydrate skin, remove excess oils and help improve the appearance of pores.

Snack: There was fresh coffee and some of the parents who received the email asking for help made baked fresh goods which was amazing.

Lunch: Every month our school has pizza for lunch for the students. We wanted to give them a bit fancier ‘italian-style’ pizza and offered a Caesar salad for those with gluten allergies. Because we have a lot of Italians, we offered a charcuterie /cheese board. We rounded it out with Mr. Puffs, traditional Greek doughnut holes (a.k.a. Loukoumades). Yep we have a lot of different ethnicities in our school!

Printable: We found free printables from Skip to My Lou to decorate our table for pizza.

A little extra: In our ask for help to parents & PPO we asked if anyone has manicurist or massage skills to offer. One of our parents stepped up and offered staff mini manicures of 25 minutes each. This gave staff enough time for a coat of polish and a relaxing hand massage on their time off/prep period before heading back to class.

WEDNESDAY: We Are ‘BANANAS’ For You

Gift: This was probably our funniest gift of the week. Originally, we thought to give them all a banana muffin. Being a past baker I figured worst case I can whip up 70 muffins if we couldn’t find a donation. Then as we secured some of the other gifts, we wanted to give more useful gifts and we came up with the idea to give a stress banana. Teaching is stressful right? And worst case it can be a decoration for their desk.

As you can imagine 6 moms sitting around wrapping up bananas for teachers, with wine of course, where the conversation went. Well it was nice to know the teachers were the same… it was their favorite gift of the week!

Morning Snack: Tuesday morning coffee was joined with fruit and more baked goods from school parents.

Recess/Lunch Snack: For those wanting something a little more than a coffee and cookie in the morning we set up a snack for recess & lunchtime of Fresh juice (mix of fruit, fresh veggies, unsweetened juices) and an assortment of home baked banana treats. Of course we had some real bananas there too!

THURSDAY: It’s Worth ‘NOTE’ing That You Are Awesome

Gift: Originally, we hoped to give every teacher a journal with their name on it. But that wasn’t in the cards… or budget. Instead we found these cute notebooks online, and a cute simple pen.

Snack: For Thursday we offered fruit and a lemon coffee cake with coffee… plus some left over banana breads and muffins!

Lunch: We are in the greater Montreal area, so of course we had to have bagels! But we didn’t want to just give bagels, so instead we offered bagels, with chili. We made sure we had vegetarian options too.

Originally, we were supposed to have doughnuts, but our supplier cancelled on us on Tuesday. We saved the money from doughnuts and the next day a parent offered to bring in 2 giant cakes that day for dessert.

It’s too bad too cause we had found a great free printable from teachers pay teachers for Staff Appreciation Donuts!

FRIDAY: You are ‘SOUP’er

Gift: This was my FAVORITE gift! I go the idea from a friend’s daughter who was selling soup-in-a-jar to raise funds for a school trip. Being crafty, I realized there had to be a way we could make something similar. Teachers would get a soup they could make and if nothing else they would get a mason jar that ‘cool’ kids use as drinking glasses! We searched and found Wholefully.com who had easy to follow instructions.

Although we all wanted to make the Italian Barley one, the sundried tomatoes made it too expensive. We chose 3 flavors: Coconut Curry, Spicy Black Bean and Split Pea.

The great thing is that Wholefully offers tags that you can print and use with the instructions. Our cool graphics person made us double sided labels with our tagline on one side and instruction on back.

Snack: For the snack it was meant to be simple coffee, fruit and another coffee cake. BUT we ended up having a snow day so that was cancelled.

Lunch: This was to be our BIG lunch. To keep costs low, we decided to do a PPO potluck. We were so happy that almost everyone on the PPO offered to bring something. We reached out to some ‘friends’ of our school too to supplement what we were missing.

A potluck means that we had a mish-mash of food, but we tried to keep the tagline by offering different types of soup.

MONDAY: You are re’MARK’able

Gift: This year we did so good on budget we were able to get the teachers a little something extra. Since mostly everyone uses white boards, we thought some dry erase markers would be a good and practical gift. Originally, we were going to put it at the end of the day Friday, but school was cancelled so we went in the following day and placed the gift.

Snack: Since we didn’t have the big potluck on Friday, we still wanted to end on a high note, so we had coffee, cheesecakes and fruit as a last snack to end the week.