Teacher Appreciation Themes for Your School

April 30, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Teacher appreciation week is typically celebrated in the first full week of May, but any time is a good time to tell and show teachers how much we care. Whether you’re a parent looking for teacher appreciation ideas or an administrator wanting a fun way to reward your team, here are some great themes and ideas for teacher appreciation week.

At my daughter’s school we typically turn the conference room into a lounge and full stock it with snacks, as well as bringing in lunch at least during the week. These snack-themed printables from Tidy Lady Printables are great for a themed snack day, whether you’re serving popcorn, cookies, snowcones or s’mores.

The Aloha Hut has a cute idea for a candy bar for teacher appreciation, complete with printables you can use to make your own.

If your school decorates doors, check out this collection of door ideas for teacher appreciation from Events to Celebrate. It might give you an idea for a theme you could use for a gift or whole school theme as well. For example there are several garden themed ones, which could turn into giving teachers plants for their classrooms or other garden-themed goodies.

Play Party Plan has a good roundup of teacher appreciation ideas, including cookies, coffee, doughnuts, pie, Italian sodas and more. Such fun and easy ways to provide teachers with treats throughout the day.

PTO Today has a list of a ton of different teacher appreciation ideas that have been done in the real world (and not necessarily by party professionals, so they’re doable for the rest of us). Lots of snack carts, travel themes, sweet gifts and time out activities to make teachers feel a tiny bit of the appreciation and love we feel for them all year long.

Do you have great ideas for teacher appreciation themes? Or a gift you’ve given a teacher that they loved? We’d love to hear about it!

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Gross Motor Math Ideas

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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