End of Year Gifts for Students
Hi friends,
I truly wanted to blog about these sooner, so you could use this idea for your end of year gifts if you wanted… however, I teach middle school and most of my students are fascinated with finding their teacher on social media. I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for my students.
This year was a little different for me. For my first two years of teaching I was self-contained in 5th grade. I absolutely loved the relationships I formed, and as a result loved putting a lot of thought into my end of year gifts. I usually go way too overboard and spend way too much money, but it wasn’t too bad because I had a typical class of 24.
Well at my new school, after I got hired, I found out I would only be teaching ELA so I would have two classes of 23. I honestly was pretty heart-broken for a lot of different reasons, but I was really worried about the relationship portion of teaching when you have multiple classes.
Another thing about me is that my love language is gifts. I know this is one of the more rare love languages to have, but it’s very common in my family. I sometimes think acts of service and gifts are similar because I associate giving a gift with doing something for someone.
Anyway, I knew it would be hard for me to give up this end of year gift-giving that I do, even with 45 students. I didn’t want to completely break the bank. I did better than my husband probably expected, but here is what I did.
Just select create on the homepage.
To put the words in select the “load” button on the top left corner. Just type the words into the “Enter Text” section. You just have to put a space between each word and you can’t have hyphenated words. So if kids says hard worker about a student, I just type it in as “hardworker.”
After you put the words you can choose the shape…
Then you get finished products that look like this:
This picture below is of the gifts for my homeroom class. I will be honest and say it’t not a quick project but I always love how it is a gift from me and from their classmates.
If I could figure out a way to get the image in PowerPoint and print everything on one page, I would do it, but no luck yet my friends. So I just go in PowerPoint and make the background page, tape the Tagxedo image to the front (in the middle). I used a font called “sweet pea.”
For the frames, right around graduation time, the dollar store has them! Definitely more with 45 students, but everything else as just a matter of printing.
I also gave each student a book. I usually just try to find a book that’s a dollar on Scholastic. My first year, we had read Freak the Mighty and I was able go get copies for $1.00. The next year, we read Ungifted by Gordan Korman and a different book of his was a $1.00 on Scholastic, so I got those. This year I didn’t have that luck, so I just bought Pictures of Hollis Woods for the girls and Woods Runner for the boys. I also wrote a note to each student inside the books.
The last thing I did was make a bookmark, for each student, so they could remember our year in 6th grade. The bookmarks had their names and the images of the 5 novels we have read together.
Feel free to ask me any questions that you have! I would love to answer.
Muah!
Martina
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Very cool! This is similar to the Christmas gift I make for them.
Pro-Hack: I highly suggest Tagul (same idea, different website). You can save the images and add them to PowerPoint/Google Slides and make the bookmarks that way. You can also make individual words different colors and sizes if you want certain words to pop out more. There are still a variety of shapes to choose from or you can even upload your own picture (the kids used it to make Wonder character traits and found the pictures from the books – they turned out SO NEAT!).
Love your site and will continue to stalk, er, follow you as you continue your journey into the higher grades!
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