Baskets Full of Teacher Appreciation

Teacher Appreciation Week happens only once a year, but teacher appreciation should happen all year around!  In this post, I hope to inspire you to create baskets full of joy for the teachers in your life. As a local teacher's association leader, my officers and I were brainstorming ways to show our members a little bit of extra love during March and April.  The stress of the school year was catching up to everyone and with mandatory state assessments coming up, everyone could use a little pick me up.  We decided to reward all of our members with a basket.  We have a small CTA so this was totally doable for us.  Each morning for 22 days (that was the number of members we had that year) we announced a CTA Member of the Day.  The dialogue over the intercom went something like this:

"Good Morning!  This is Mrs. King, CTA President, here to announce our CTA Member of the Day.  Congratulations to Mrs. Prewitt, today's winner.  Mrs. Prewitt thank you for everything that you do for our school and our students.  We think you are awesome!"

Next, a special delivery was made to their classroom.  We created several different themed baskets that would be eye-catching and a treat for the winner.  We also slipped a $10 gift card in the basket too! On the back of each tag (created in PowerPoint and printed), I folded up the paper and slipped in the gift card.  Here's what it said:

We picked a few basket themes and made multiple baskets with the same theme.  This made shopping less of a headache.  Here are a few of the baskets we created:

Super Sipper Basket -This basket contained a cool plastic cup that comes with a lid and straw (and can bounce a few times on hard classroom tile without breaking!).  In addition there was tea, Tang, a small pitcher, several drink mixes that you can use with a bottle of water and more!

Here's the Scoop Basket - This fun basket barely fit in one basket!  Inside this basket was syrups, sauces, sprinkles and waffle bowls.  In addition we added an ice cream scoop!

How Does Your Garden Grow Basket - We knew that we had a few gardeners in our midst so this basket contained some gardening basics.  We added a few tools, some seed packets, pretty gardening gloves, a rose bush plant , a rain gauge and a few pretty baubles.

ORANGE You Glad You're Here Today Basket - This basket was SO fun!  It is filled with random orange things!  Drinks, snacks, gum, air freshener, candy and even a Tide pen!

Basket Full of Sunshine - Similar to the Orange You Glad basket, this basket is filled with yellow things.  Actually, the yellow things were pretty big so we ended up having to create a basket and a bonus pack when we delivered.  So much fun!  This one has Pringles, yellow Gatorade, wet wipes, Juicy Fruit, vanilla Oreos, lemonade and more.

Another basket that we created that is not pictured above was a Chocolate Lover's basket.  It was filled with candy, hot chocolate, chocolate syrup and more. Our members were so excited to get their baskets and this activity was a great way to show appreciation for all of the hard work they do.  Students loved cheering for their teacher too!  By the end of our giveaway time I had a student volunteer to beat box for me so I could rap the announcement of the winner.  Such fun!
You might also like my next teacher appreciation post:  A POPular Teacher Appreciation Idea