Some Creative Ideas for How You Can #ThankATeacher

08May
by Alma Renteria

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” –Carl Jung

Looking back to my years in grade school, I can still remember how excited I was to go to school. As a teacher now, I now recognize that my joy came from the fortune of having brilliant teachers who taught me more than academic content and focused a great deal of energy on providing me opportunities to live up to my own potential. After struggling through my first year of teaching, I gained a whole new sense of respect for all the teachers that in one way or another impacted my life for the better. While I have done my best to go back to say thank you to each and every teacher that believed in me and managed to teach me to also believe in myself, I know that I will never be able to truly demonstrate just how much I appreciate them and/or demonstrate just how grateful I truly am.

In efforts to symbolically thank all the teachers that changed my life, I have made it a personal tradition to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week.  In planning for this week, however, I have learned over time just how time consuming it can be to try and come up with a creative way to say THANK YOU. Thus, I want to share a Google folder with ideas and ready-to-print templates for your personal use as saying ‘Thank You’ shouldn’t be so much work (I already did enough planning, so why not share the wealth?).

Additionally, I want to share my go-to site where every year, I borrow ideas on different teacher appreciation gifts. Feel free to browse through or use the ideas in the folder above to simply get you started.

Our teachers are unsung heroes and while they deserve to be recognized on a daily basis, I encourage you to help make the best of this week and help make them feel special. Together, we can create ripples of joy — all it takes is for you to go say THANK YOU to a teacher and little by little, we will see the love spread.

P.S. These ideas are all borrowed from different sources and meant to be for personal use only. Please respect their work. 🙂

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Alma Renteria

Alma-Delia Renteria is a proud product of Lynwood schools. After graduating UC Riverside, with a B.A. in English and a year earlier than anticipated, she decided to commit her “gap year” to City Year. After City Year Los Angeles, Alma went on to purse a teaching career with Teach For America Los Angeles. Upon joining TFA, Alma began her education career as a middle school teacher. It was while teaching that she realized the need to do her part to help serve the community she grew up in and decided to run for office, getting elected to the Lynwood School Board at only 23 years old. Alma completed her first Master’s degree in Urban Education at Loyola Marymount University and a 2nd Masters in Educational Leadership along with her Admin Credential at Concordia University. She was appointed by the Speaker to the Instructional Quality Commission and re-elected to the Lynwood School Board in 2018. She currently serves as the Principal at a local elementary school in Pico Rivera, where she hopes to demonstrate that magic is possible when thee right people are given opportunities to lead.

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