One day during Teacher Appreciation Week we designate flower day. Each child brings in one flower and a room mom provides a vase. The kids present the teacher with the flowers as they walk in the door and a volunteer puts the flowers in the vase. Each teacher ends up with a nice arrangement of flowers from the students. This has become a tradition at our school.
(I recommend advising your local grocery store to have single flowers available that morning and the afternoon before. Our grocery store orders extra flowers and keeps them as singles since most of the time they sell arrangements or bunches of flowers. The store was happy to help and looks forward to it every year.)
One year we had a SUPER/SOUPER theme. We had signs that said our teachers are super. We provided a Soup lunch one day, another day the room mom's sent home a piece of paper that said, "If Mrs. _____ were a soup, she would be _________ and the students wrote a paragraph or two and then presented the papers to the teachers. These were sent out a week before. We ended the week with a canned food (soup) drive for charity.
When you get the teachers to bring in their photos you could also have them fill in a standard questionaire of favorite things from their childhood the kids would want to know like: favorite meal, TV show, subject in school, playground game, what they thought they would be when they grew up, etc. That would really give the kids something to relate to and enjoy learning.
the star ideas are awesome.....you could even combine that with our past idea of before they were stars. If you have teachers that cooperate, they could bring in pictures of them when they were younger , start a board of match for the students....this also helps the students know that their teachers have been in the students shoes, and the students no matter where they come from can be anything they want to be. Awards would go great too! Academy awards so to speak and have voting on the best, coolest, etc. This is really cool for the older grades of the school because they are moving on and would be a good memory time of their time at the younger school levels. Just some more thoughts.
Hi Mommytlc,
I am just beginning to do research to come up with some different ideas for this year's staff appreciation week and kind of decided to go with a hollywood theme as well! I had thought of doing stars, too, (large ones) perhaps with the teacher's name and comments from the students written on them and then hanging them on the walls...I'd like to put them on the floor like in Hollywood. Or, you could have a "bravo" board near the school's entrance with students' notes of appreciation.
Then, I thought for the end-of-the-week luncheon I'd do really nice table cloths and music and have students or parents there to clean up, refill drinks,etc.
We do something different each day...so I'm trying to come up with other "star" related fun things to do...any other ideas?
Last year we had a luau lunch for the teachers, gave out small gifts, and had breakfast 2 days. All of this was spread out over the whole week. This year we are having like a Hollywood party and we will decorate the lounge with stars. We are going to get the children involved some kind of way this year as well but we haven't figured out how yet.
