Teacher Appreciation Ideas for School Leaders and Parents

Ideas for School Leaders

If you’re a school leader, pushing Teacher Appreciation Week in your school can create engagement and raise awareness of the event among students. Here are some things you can do:

• Discuss Teacher Appreciation Week in school newsletters. This way, parents and students can plan ahead for the event and can begin to prepare any gifts they would like to give or make. You could include this Teacher Appreciation Child Handprint Craft in the newsletter for parents to do with their kids at home. Students can then bring these in and leave them in their favorite teacher’s cubby hole or on their desk. 
• Create challenges for students within school and at home. Challenges could include personalizing door hangers that come within this Teacher Appreciation Celebration Pack and hanging them from their favorite teacher’s door as a nice surprise. Another challenge could be for students to design an affirming appreciation poster, which they can then gift to their teacher. These can be displayed throughout the hallways and classrooms. If you would like to make it a competition, the teacher could choose their favorite poster, and the child who wins receives a prize! If you’re looking for poster templates, then this Teacher Appreciation Pack contains wonderful posters, worksheets and crafts, which are perfect for getting students involved in Teacher Appreciation Week. 
• You could show your own appreciation by writing teachers a card or thank-you note. You could even encourage the administrative and paraprofessional colleagues to join in and create a really warm buzz around the school!

Ideas for Parents

Parents can support their children in buying and making gifts and crafts for their teacher. Providing supplies and gifts for teachers is a wonderful way to show appreciation, but also an essential one. Twinkl’s teacher appreciation survey found that 66 percent of educators relied on gifts/donations to provide their students with supplies throughout the school year. Twinkl’s survey also showed that educators valued homemade and personalized gifts above other things, so making crafts and cards could be the perfect way to show your appreciation.

• Create a gift basket for your child’s teacher and include things they could find helpful in their classroom, such as stationery. 
• Come together as parents and create a scrapbook for the teacher with a drawing from each child of their teacher. This is endearing but could also be funny! You could also use notes from students instead of drawings. 
• Children can create a homemade card for their teacher. Cards are a wonderful show of appreciation, especially ones made from scratch. One idea: Encourage your child to draw their classmates and teacher on the front of the card to add a personal touch. 
• Bake cupcakes with your child and consider decorating them with positive affirmations such as “Best Teacher Ever!,” “Thank You!” and any other appreciative messages. If you do choose to do this, just make sure you know your teacher’s food intolerances.
• Encourage your child to write a poem for their teacher. They could include their favorite things about their teacher, things their teacher helps them with and how great they are! 
• Encourage your child and their classmates to write their favorite thing about their teacher on a small piece of paper and gather these together in a jar. Students can then decorate the jar and gift it to their teacher. 

Although this blog aims to shine light on ways to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, teachers should be celebrated all year round, not just during this week. Make sure they know what a good job they’re doing and how much you appreciate them! 

We hope you’ve found some useful tips from this blog. If you’re looking for more Teacher Appreciation Week ideas and resources, you’ll find them here. And if you would like a more visual teaching aid about Teacher Appreciation Week, check out this helpful video.