Giddy Up Friday: Teacher Appreciation Gift Idea

Last year I coordinated an end of the year teacher appreciation gift for all the teachers in my daughters preschool class. With the help of all the students, I made these platters at a local paint your own pottery studio (Glazey Days) for each teacher. First I found out their favorite color(s), for their name and the year, and a coordinating color for all the kids names!

I initially had the students write their names on each plate with a pencil - but that proved difficult as some wrote really huge and I saw we would quickly run out of room. I quickly switched gears and instead, had them write their name just once on a piece of paper, which I later traced onto the plates and then traced with the glaze.

I added a quote "it starts with one....and ends with a thousand possibilities" which is from the Montessori philosophy and included one yellow dot for each childs name, to represent the concept of the the "golden beads". I also wrote all of the teachers names in a lowercase font - because that is the Montessori way of teaching the alphabet (only lowercase first). My daughter Elephant drew a sweet little picture of the school that I later traced onto the back of each plate.

 I thought it was a worthy keepsake and wanted to share the idea with all of you, in case any of you are looking for some ideas! You could easily do it on a much smaller scale on a mug orice cream bowl as well.

The last pic is one of the tags (I'm no scrapbooker - but I thought they came out pretty cute!) I made to include each child's name on the gift that participated in it, and each child/family was present to give the gifts to each teacher. I couldn't share this last year since it was done at the very end...and I'm not sure what we are doing this year - since I still have a couple of weeks remaining!

Have a great weekend!