Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Child’s Classroom From TeacherLists.com

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king for a way to really help your teachers this holiday season? Check out this article about great classroom gifts on our sister site, www.teacherlists.com, by PTO Today Associate Editor Elizabeth S. Leaver. The article includes tons of ideas for useful and educational gifts for the classroom. We have some examples of gift ideas here in this blog, and you can find the full list here.

Also, consider helping teachers set up their own Classroom Holiday Gift List on www.teacherlists.com. It works something like a wedding registry, allowing parents to select and purchase a classroom gift online.

Classroom Gift Ideas:

• Art Supplies: The brightly colored designs in Roylco’s Animals and Creature Paper lend themselves to a world of wildlife-theme possibilities, including origami, murals, masks, and more. (preschool-elementary grades; $10.99) Big stencils mean big fun! The Roylco Mega Stencils with pop-out templates come in a set of eight, making it simple for kids to have hours of fun with paint, chalk, and colored pencils. (preschool-elementary grades; $17.99)


• Social Studies: Children will enjoy learning or enhancing their map skills with Creative Teaching Press Map Skills workbooks, a series that uses age-appropriate maps for practicing skills like using latitude and longitude, locating places on a grid, estimating distances using scale, and more. (grades 2-6; $11.54-$35.68) Just about every classroom could use the House of Doolittle Laminated World Map. At 50 inches x 33 inches, the map has write-on/wipe-off capability and includes national capitals, major cities, rivers, time zones, and major peak elevations. What’s more, the heavy lamination will last for years. (elementary-middle grades; $28.55)


• Science: The Dowling Magnetics Super Science Magnet Kit contains everything students need to explore the science of magnetic forces, including a lodestone, the Earth’s only natural magnet. (grades 3 and up; $23.18) Based on a NASA Space Shuttle experiment to study ants in zero gravity, the Fascinations Toys and Gifts Antworks Space Age Ant Habitat Set contains a nontoxic translucent gel that acts as the tunnel medium for the ants as well as their food and water source—providing hours of good (and clean) fun and instruction. (grades 2-6; $1.83)


• Math: For students learning the fundamentals of money, the Didax Money Sudoku Game contains everything needed to complete 10 challenging Sudoku puzzles, including 32 realistic coins, 10 full-color game boards, and an answer key. (early elementary grades; $11.99) Teaching shapes and sizes is easier (and more fun) with Learning Resources Mini GeoSolids, a set of 32 colorful plastic geometric pieces in four sizes of eight shapes: triangular prism, cube, cone, cylinder, rectangular prism, hexagonal prism, triangular pyramid, and square pyramid. (preK-elementary grades; $14.99)


• English/Language Arts: Teachers can help boost middle graders’ vocabulary and reading comprehension skills with the Didax Cloze Middle Grades Activity Books, which include more than 150 pages in a three-book set, plus a free book of spelling essentials. (elementary-middle grades; $29.35) Give young readers a boost with Didax Rhyming Words Matching Puzzle Cards, a 30-card puzzle set that helps students with word recognition as well as vocabulary development and rhyming. (grades K-3; $13.99)