May 5th is National Teacher Appreciation Day and many schools had week-long celebrations planned to honor these hard-working individuals. Even though we are not on our school campuses, we know that our teachers are working harder than ever and that they are still worthy of recognition.
Your Staff Appreciation Week might look different, but social distancing shouldn’t stop your campus from helping the teachers, aides, administrators, librarians, secretaries, custodians, and all the other staff from feeling some love!
We have compiled some of our favorite ideas for celebrating teachers and staff from a distance:
- National PTA has an entire emoji-themed Teacher Appreciation Week toolkit that is free to download. Check it out here.
- Schools are asking students to submit videos thanking staff and editing them together.
- Take your week of themes digital! Email a note to your teacher. Make a virtual bouquet where students take a photo of a flower or greenery on their daily walk and collage them into a “bouquet” that gets posted to Google Classroom. Wear the teacher’s favorite color on your weekly Zoom call to show them how much you care. This is a great time to creatively use social media too– share photos of the daily themes to post on Facebook or Instagram.
- Create a banner to post on the school fence thanking the staff for their hard work or create a yard sign for teacher appreciation. If you are going to have a banner made by a printer, remember to get this expense approved by your association.
- If a staff luncheon is part of your tradition (and included in your hospitality budget), you could ask a local restaurant to create box lunches that the staff could pick-up and enjoy at home.
- Ask all of the families in your school to change their profile picture this week to a home-made sign thanking teachers. It will not only make the teachers at your school feel amazing, but it will also reach out to any of your Facebook friends who also happen to be teachers — it’s a win-win!
Remember that PTA funds shouldn’t be used to purchase personal gifts or gift cards.
If you have other ideas to share with us, please email us at communications@capta.org– we would love to hear from you!
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