Teacher End-of-the-Year Gifts

If anything that Pinterest has taught me, is that there is nothing new under the sun.  The following post is all stolen from someone else - in fact, if you look at my decorating in my home, barely anything is my own idea (and even the ones that are mine, I've seen pinned on Pinterest by someone else...so apparently I'm not as creative as I think I am...)  :P  But, I wanted to share my girls' gifts for their teachers this year, even if I can't take full credit for them!

Bus Drivers:
My little girl rides a special bus to preschool and they come right up to my door to get her.  Besides the driver, they also have a helper that helps buckle the preschoolers into their seats, so I wanted to thank them as well!  My older girl just has the one bus driver, so it was easy to copy and paste this for her.  But since Emmie is picked up by one bus in the morning and dropped off at Grandma's house in the afternoon by a different driver/bus, I had to double the gifts for her!!!  Sigh.  Thank goodness this gift was only a couple of bucks a piece.

A bottle of Mt. Dew with Mounds candy bars attached.  Tag reads: Mounds of thanks for all you Dew!  Thanks for getting me to school safely this year!

Teachers:
Emmie goes to a special ed preschool for her speech, so besides the main teacher, she also has 3 EAs in her class.  Well, of course I have to get all four of them something!  I just picked up a large bag of M&Ms and some little spice jars from the Dollar Tree and was inspired by this post for the poem, but I changed it a bit to add the color brown and changed the wording so the poem flowed freely.

Green is for the inspiration you give me each day.

Blue is for your patience in showing the way.

Orange is for your warmth and caring style.

Yellow is for the way you make me smile.

Red is for the love you often show.

Brown is for the learning you give as I grow.

You place knowledge in my hands that melt into my heart and live forever! You're a "Magnificent" & "Marvelous" Teacher! Thank you for being my M&M!

For my older daughter (she, fortunately, only has one teacher, so I spent a little more on her), I got her a tumbler and stuffed individual servings of different flavors of iced tea around a tube (made out of a used toilet paper roll).  This gave the packets stability and created space inside for Ashers to make a personal note/artwork to put inside.  I told her to make something that reflected her favorite memory of her teacher and she's going to draw about the 100th day of school.  The tag that will be on tumbler will say "Thanks for quenching my thirst for knowledge".  I got the idea here.

 And that's it for 2013!  I love Pinterest for the ideas and I feel bad about stealing other's great ones and then blogging about mine (but I do credit when I can).  However, as my drama teacher always told me,

Imitation is the Best Form of Flattery!

Outnumber the Grains of Sand

Car Travel - Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags

Only one more sleep until our road trip!  I've got a pile of bags sitting by the door ready to load up and go!  Whew!  The kids are excited, I'm excited, hubby excited...although both of us are a little wary of how all the prep for the car ride will go.  I hope we return with live children and we don't slaughter them on the way down to CA... ;)  (kidding of course!)

I have compiled an entertainment bag for each child.  One is 7 and the other is 3 at the time of this writing, so their needs and desires are different.  Besides the normal electronics (you know, stuff we didn't have when WE were traveling for long periods!) like DS player, DVD player, Mom and Dad's Kindles and iPods and smart phones...I wanted to "un-tether" them for stretches and torture them like I was tortured riding next to my brother.  I have divised a way to separate them (at least visually) from each other and in my test drives with the curtain, they are loving it.  We'll see how long it lasts for this drive!

But on to the car bags!

Here is the car bags in all of their glory.  We will be gone for 10 days and 6 of those will be on the road.  Hopefully, this will last us all 6 days.  The kids' initial bags are the pink and purple ones on the left of this picture.  They also will get the blue and pink binders and the 2 cookie sheets.  The large bag in the top right is Mom and Dad's bag (more on that below).

The little brown bags have a new toy or two for each leg of the trip (as well as a bonus bag on the day before Disneyland where they can dress up like Princesses with crowns, wands, and necklaces).  I've labled each bag with when to hand it out ("Sunday North" means the Sunday on our way home when we're headed north!).  Some blogs that I've seen similar ideas on suggest doing this every hour or every state, but I've decided to just go with a new bag a day.

The 7-year old's car bag...she's got tape, some word searches and a coloring book, crayons, and headphones.

The Journey Maps (which I described in greater detail here), start out the 7-year old's binder.  There are several plastic sheets to keep everything contained.  The following pictures of activities in her binder I printed from the online ebook "Ultimate Road Trip Games" which can be bought for $15 and downloaded immediately.  Personally, I could have created each of these, but the money spent was worth it to me in stress and time.  I highly recommend this ebook!

 Sound Scavenger Hunt, Road Scavenger Hunt

 

The 3-year old binder is a bit different.  She can't read or play standby games like the license plate game, so it was more of a challenge to fill hers up.  It opens with a pouch to hold her crayons and dot stickers and a coloring book in the first plastic sheet holder.

Next are some Alphabet and Number Dot pages (where she will use the stickers found in the beginning of the binder).  

The older girl has some color by number sheets as well, but I needed to find some that didn't have math problems and was more user-friendly for a 3-year old!.  I found these online after a simple search.

Finally, the grownups bag holds our kindles and our own entertainment as well as paperwork for the trip and a big fat file folder filled with extra sheets for the girls:

...more sheets of the games and printables for both of the girls - they didn't get ALL of the color by number sheets or the alphabet dots at once...hopefully this will stretch out the use during the whole trip.

So that's it.  We're off!  Pray for safe travels and a fun trip!

For the rest of the Car Travel Series:

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots

Part Two: Alphabet Color By Number

Part Three: Journey Maps

Part Four: Car Pillow Tutorial

Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards - Preschool

Car Travel - Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards

Our trip to California is fast approaching!  I've almost got both girls' car bags ready to go - I'll have a post on what's in it when they're all done.  But for today, I've created some flash cards for my 3-year old to practice letter recognition and working on words.  I bought some magnetic letters at the Dollar Tree and so was limited on what words I created - I couldn't use words that had a letter repeated in the word since my pack of letters only had one of each!  I thought that would be tough, but I ended up with 7 pages with 10 words on each when all was said and done.  Since my daughter can't read yet (hence the practicing), I paired each word with a clip art from Microsoft Word so she can start to recognize the letters and words.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake when I printed them out by putting them all in lower case and then laminating the cards before checking the magnetic letters I had purchased...they were all uppercase!!!!  Ugh!!!  So I've changed the letters in the printable that is below this post, so all of the words are now in uppercase and will match the magnetic letters. But the ones my daughter will be taking on this trip are uppercase letters with lowercase flash cards - hopefully it doesn't cause her too much frustration.  But I'm running out of time to re-laminate 70 cards...

The letters are contained in her cookie sheet (also from the Dollar Tree) and she can practice making the words by matching the letters.  We'll see how long this entertains her.  ;)

To download your own printable (in PDF) of my 70 preschool words that have no

repeating letters, click HERE.

For the rest of the Car Travel Series:

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots

Part Two: Alphabet Color By Number

Part Three: Journey Maps

Part Four: Car Pillow Tutorial

Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags

Car Travel: Part Four - Travel Pillow Tutorial

I finally got off the couch and made something with my sewing machine.  I am by no stretch of the imagination a seamstress...but I can sew a straight line with my machine and thankfully this project only required straight lines!  

I was inspired by another blog that had a shot of her child cuddling with a travel pillow and decided that I wanted to make one for each of my girls for the upcoming road trip to California.  It looked simple enough to make and I thought I'd just wing it.  I have several extra pillowcases around the house, so it was just a matter of grabbing two of them and then purchasing a big bag of pillow stuffing.

This bag cost me around $4 or $5 at Walmart.  I didn't get the basic version as I wanted these pillows to be a bit more fluffy and soft than the other fiber was.  This was the next step up.

First things first: clear off my sewing machine and take note of the thread already in there...purple.  Eh, good enough.  ;)  Next, gather the bag of fluff and two pillowcases.  I chose bright pink matching ones so that the girls wouldn't fight over them.

Second, stuff a quarter of one of the pillows with fluff.  Make sure to push gently into the corners.  Then using pins, close up the pillowcase and get ready to sew.

As you sew, make sure to smooth out the fabric underneath.  I didn't on the first one and ended up with bunches under my thread, but it wasn't important enough to me to rip out the seam and smooth it out.  

Third, pull the fluff that was caught on the outside of your seam (and even in the seam) out.

Fourth, smooth out the pillowcase and make another line of pins about 2-4 inches away from your first seam.  This is where the seat belt will go.  Sew that baby shut.

Fifth, stuff more filling in loosely, making sure to push some fluff into the corners of your seat belt buffer seam.  I filled it until the pillowcase's original seam and used it as a reference for my final sewing line.

Sixth, pin up the end of the pillowcase (again, I left about 2 inches on the end...maybe I'll take pinking shears and trim it up, but then again, maybe not...) and sew shut.  Make sure to pull out any escaping fluff once you're done!

All done!  One pillow divided into two pillows with a flat area in the middle.  Each pillow took me about 20 minutes to make from start to finish and that bag of fluff was enough for both pillows.

To use: put pillow between rider and seat belt, then fold over on the flat area and cuddle up against the window!

 They're not perfect (my kids, either!), but I think they will do the job!

Other posts in the Car Travel Series:

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots

Part Two: Alphabet Color By Number

Part Three: Journey Maps

Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards (Preschool)

Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags

Car Travel: Part Three - Journey Maps

To help alleviate the "are we there yet?" questions from my eldest daughter, I created a Journey Map for each day of the car ride.  I used Google Maps and just zoomed in on the trip and took a screenshot and copied the screenshot into my photo editing software.  I pieced the screenshots together to have one full shot for my daughter to follow along.  Each day prints into a single sheet and there is a place for her to keep notes if she sees something interesting on the way.  I've seen cute little travel timelines, but since we are renting a car for the journey down, I didn't want something complex that I had to create and install while packing up.  So here is her own compact timeline and she can follow along with a highlighter and highlight our path as we go.  I think this will also help her to see how far we have yet to go or how close we are to our destination.

(for privacy, I am only sharing one of our days)

Other posts in the Car Travel Series:

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots

Part Two: Alphabet Color By Number

Part Four: Travel Pillow Tutorial

Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards (Preschool)

Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags

Car Travel - Part Two: Alphabet Color by Number

Part two of my "prep for the long car ride from hell" series (AKA the Drive to Disneyland) has a free printable from Reading with Kids.  They have all of these Color By Number sheets there on their website, but each letter was one single page.  I have simply taken their sheets and combined them into one PDF so one could print them all at once.  I did not do the same to their Color by Letter sheets, so if you want to peruse their other printables, go here.

But for the free PDF of the Color by Number sheets (one for each letter - and some look to be somewhat challenging), go HERE.  Below is a couple of sample letters.

My seven-year old was looking on in envy as I printed these out last night...she can't wait to dive into them!  I'm going to dole them out periodically throughout the trip so she doesn't do them all at once!

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots
Part Three: Journey Maps
Part Four: Travel Pillow Tutorial
Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards (Preschool)
Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags