THANK YOU!

For the teacher appreciation luncheon, I made 300+ magnets.  The bulk of the magnets show Christina's school initials, and other magnets read, "teach," "joy," "inspire," "ABC," "xyz," and "A+."

Our kids made cards for their teachers and TA's and put them inside tins and added magnets for their teacher thank you gift...today is the last day of school!  The tins are from Micheal's and directions for making the magnets are in this previous post.

If you can guess how many magnets I made without going over, I'll give you/send you a  tin with five magnets:)  Just include your guess in your comment by midnight tonight.  HINT: I made more than are on the large magnet board, but count if you want.
We are so thankful for the great teachers our kids had this year. We moved here the first week of school and could have dealt with all kinds of difficulties adjusting to new schools and making new friends, but the teachers and schools really were great in taking special care to see that our children made a smooth transition. The other morning Grace woke me up in tears. She said, "Mommy, there are only 9 more days of school! I don't want school to be over!"
Christina was blessed with a team of teachers who at parent teacher conference said, "If your child has a hard time organizing their backpack, we'll work with them for a full week helping them go through their homework assignments to figure out they need to include in their backpacks. Usually after a week they are self sufficient and sick of our help:)" One of Christina's teachers has been battling cancer since spring break and has continued to teach through her chemo treatments.
Thomas' teacher has been so patient and effective in helping him focus, build on his strengths, and establish good peers.

We are so thankful for our teachers this year!

Teacher luncheon notes- We spent most of our budget obviously on the food.  We decided to have it catered since there would be over 100 staff members in attendance.  We found a local catering deli that brought in 5 varieties of boxed sandwich lunches- roast beef, turkey, tuna, ham, and vegan.  We could have done away with the ham and had more vegan sandwiches.  We did have plenty though, but not too much.  6 PTO members brought cut up fruit and we tossed 3 large fruit salads to compliment the lunch.  There was hardly any salad left, so the quantity was near perfect.  In the box lunch (I just saw the ham box, & I'm assuming they were identical sides) there was a small pasta salad, a pickle, and a cookie.  The catering company came, set up the lunch tables, and brought water bottles.  We had tubs of ice ready to keep the cold water bottles chilled.  We had door prizes: all 14 potted petunia centerpieces, a Trader Joe's gift bag filled with their "bestsellers," as well as gift cards for the catering company, a local florist, Au bon Pain, Lala Java, Black Diamond Cafe, and Stop & Shop.  We used the RSVP slip as the ticket for the "raffle" for the door prizes, so we ended up with 99.5% of the staff rsvp'ing right away.  There was a RSVP box right by their mailboxes, so it was easy for them to RSVP.

The teachers loved the magnets-the most popular magnets were JOY, INSPIRE, TEACH, and SMS.  There were extras, so we left all of the SMS magnets with the principal to use on the office message board...or however she wanted to use them.  Another PTO member made nice bookmarks with a nice poem about the difference teachers make which was also well received, so even if they didn't win a door prize, the staff walked away with a nice token of appreciation.

The teachers LOVED having the boxed lunches because many of them needed to grab lunch and go.  They were very appreciative that we made it easy for them to do so.

This staff appreciation luncheon is an annual thing put on by our PTO.  It's casual and just a quick, nice way to say thank you to the staff at our kids' school.  Having it catered made it such a quick and easy set up.  The teachers came, ate, heard from the principal and superintendent, did the door prizes, visited, left and we (PTO) cleaned up all within about an hour's time.  This all went so well, I just might offer to help with the staff luncheon next year too:)