Free Teachers Appreciation Week Decorations and a Sale!

Let’s enjoy our Teacher's Appreciation Week and make our classrooms festive! I made these free classroom decorations which can be used as wall posters or ceiling drops to send out the message that it’s Teacher's Appreciation Week! 

Just print and laminate, then cut out the shapes. You can punch a single hole at the tops and tie through some curly ribbon then hang them from the ceiling or over the doorway. 

I really caught the TAW bug this week and I 'went to town' in my classroom with these other Teachers Appreciation gift ideas seen below.

 

Last week, the highly anticipated annual store-wide Teachers Appreciation Sale was held from Tue 7th May to Wed 8th! Yep! Two days of jaw dropping, cart filling, deals for you!  My own products were on sale last week at 20% off too. This is a sale that many teachers look out for every year because added to the discount that each store provides. the site also give and additional discount of 10% upon checkout! This is what teacherspayteachers.com does to give back and show their appreciation for teachers.

These are some popular activities that I put on sale from from my store:

The pictures above are clickable. The first two are illustrated card sets for prefixes and suffixes, great for visual learners. The blue one is all about adding up word cards to make complete words which include the prefix + root word + suffix, e.g. un+approach+able.

Illustrated Collective Noun Matching Cards. In each set, students match the collective nouns to the groups to which they belong. My students fell in love with the pictures of animals, people and things and learned about the collective nouns for each group, e.g. a litter of pups, in fun way!

 

Homophones - The first is a matching game that you play like dominoes, the second is a collection of illustrated homophones and the third is a word wall set with really cute pictures of each homophone.

I hope you had a wonderful week because as teachers, we deserve to have some goodies and a little recognition for what we do! 

Teacher Appreciation Week - Gift Ideas

Image by write-stuff.com

I saw the most beautiful teacher's gift idea on Pinterest. I looks like a tiered diaper cake but instead of the diapers, it's packed with useful, colorful, classroom stationery. There are notebooks, crayola crayons, glue sticks, index cards, and markers! I'll tell you this though, if I would ever receive such a gift, I would treasure it for weeks before I actually use it because it's just so beautiful! The nice folks at write-stuff.com made the one you see above and you can download their easy instructions manual to make one yourself.

Ooh la la! I'd love to have this! Chocolate, cookies and Teaching Joke-Books. If you are short on time and need a ready-made teacher gift, then this would be perfect for you. I saw it on amazon.  

Here are other teacher gift baskets that caught my eye from Gift Basket Village by Great Arrivals Gift Baskets...

World's Best Teacher gift basket

Teacher Appreciation Gift Basket

#1 Teacher, Gift Basket

You may also be interested in these Teacher Appreciation Thank You Cards...

Teacher Appreciation Week Sale at Teachers Notebook!

Did someone say 'Sale'? Yes, you heard right! Starting from Today, Saturday 4th of May, you are invited to come and see all of the fabulous sale offerings from many of your favorite shops at Teachers Notebook! Just click on the picture above to see all of the shops that are participating in the sale. And also I would really appreciate you stopping by my own store-wide sale that I'm throwing to celebrate the best teaching week of the year - Teachers Appreciation Week! You can click on the picture below to see the deals you can from me! I almost forgot to mention that in addition to my discount, Teachers Notebook will take an additional 10% off of whatever is in your cart!

Thank you Cards for Teachers Appreciation Week or End of School Year!

This is a complete D.I.Y craft that makes a wonderful gift for a teacher. These cards can be used for Teacher Appreciation Week or to say ‘Thank you’ at the end of the school year. It comes in pink and yellow for the female teachers and blue and purple for male teachers.

Each card says 'Thank you for...' (written above the pocket)

Each card has a special pocket on the inside that has sweet little messages on smaller cards just for the lucky teacher. These little cards come in a variety of colors and shapes to match their message. These massages are all of the things that you are thankful for. 

Here are some examples below:

Thank you for 'sparking my ideas' - written on a bulb

Thank you for 'teaching me to reach for the stars' - written on a star

Thank you for 'steering me in the right direction' - written on a steering wheel

Thank you for 'sparking my ideas' - written on a bulb

You can see each one much clearer in the pictures below.

 

I can suggest these on the left for the female teachers and these on the right for the males but you can mix and match them!

All of the messages are expressions of thanks for all of the many different things that teachers do!

It is available at my TpT store as an 18-page digital download complete a tutorial and all of the cards and shapes you'll need to make one.

BONUS!

Here's a really cool thing I discovered, all of the card inserts can make a really spectacular Teacher Appreciation Week gift idea that is so easy to make (even easier than the card!). All you'll need are thin craft ticks or skewers, clear tape, a marker, a disposable cup or small plastic flower pot, small erasers or paper clips and my card inserts. First, think of the inserts as little signs or posters, then tape them onto the craft sticks. Arrange them into the disposable cup which has already been filled with erasers or pepr clips (these will hold the craft sticks in place). Use a marker to write 'Thank you for...' on the cup.

 These are pictures of what I used... 

    

...to make this!

Happy Teachers Appreciation Week!

Why I Love Construction Paper Projects!

I discovered construction paper during my first year of teaching and I will never stop using it. We refer to it as scrap book paper or craft paper because at my school, that's what we use it for - art, craft, cutting, folding, gluing, etc. It's not only the students using it, I use it too! Why? Let me list the reasons:

1. The many different colors (even black)! I use them to make classroom posters that need to project different layers. Each color would represent a different part of the concept and bring a lot of color to by display area. See the different parts of a flower being represented in the poster above?

 

 

2. You can get it in loose pages or already bonded in booklet form. I love the ones that are already bonded because I let my students use these to make their own books as an end of year project. Click here to see an older post I did showing the books my students created about butterflies. The pictures above show the symmetry books my students made. To see more of the symmetry books they made, click here!

3. It is firmer than regular paper but is still easy for little hands to cut and it is available in different sizes to suit any purpose. The very large sizes can be folded down to a quarter of its size to create greeting cards that are quite sturdy. I still love using felt and card stock paper but construction paper is the easiest paper for students to handle, especially if cutting is involved. The picture above shows one that comes with cut-outs of objects from different themes. 

I'll say that when it comes to cutting, construction paper is definitely a cut above the rest!

Food Chain and Food Web Vocabulary Words - Literacy Station for Science

What is a food chain or a food web? What is a carnivore, herbivore, omnivore or scavenger? To answer question like these I made a set of food web science definition cards for my students. Each card has a picture of an organism to represent each term along with a simple, easy to understand definition. See the sample picture below. It is a total of eighteen cards available at TpT and Teachers Notebook for $3.00. I color coded each card so that the words match the colors of the theme in the definition. What do I mean? For example, the green cards have words like producer, herbivore, and photosynthesis. These cards encourage reading and will be a great addition to your science literacy station. Here is a list of all of the food web terms in this set: habitat, organism, producer, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, consumer, scavenger, decomposer, predator, prey, food chain, food web, micro-organism, fungus, energy and photosynthesis.

Speaking of reading, I also have these word wall cards that have the following terms: habitat, organism, producer, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, consumer, food chain, food web, scavenger, decomposer, predator, prey, energy, and photosynthesis. This illustrated word wall set is perfect for helping your students to remember the spelling and meanings of key food chain and food web terms. I used cute but realistic clip art of animals, plants, and micro-organisms. Some of the clip art used were created by Oxana at Teacher’s Clipart. Here's a preview (below) of one of the word wall cards - the food chain card. This one shows the words 'food chain' along with an actual food chain starting with a leaf that is by a caterpillar which is eaten by a bird which is eaten by a snake. Wait till you see the food web card. Yikes! You can click here (TpT) or here (Teachers Notebook) to see more sample pictures of this set.

If you need some books that you can have as supplementary information for your students, you can check out the full range of food chain book series available at amazon. I saw these "What if..." books that will take learning to a deeper level as students discover the calamity that happens when one organism is removed from the food chain. These are some of the books below.

  

What if there were no Bees?  What if there were no Sea Otters? What if there were no Lemmings? 

 

What if there were no Gray Wolves?

Here are some other things that can be included in your food chain science station...

  

Food Chain Bulletin Board Set                                  Food Chain Craft Kit 

       Cut out each piece and make a food chain!                   I love this idea for younger students. 

Chomp! - Food Chain Card Game

This won the Gold Seal award for best educational toy.

I will be doing a new post soon which will teach you how to teach students to make their own food chains and food webs so look out for it. It should be really helpful.