Teacher Gift That's Actually Useful

'As a former teacher, let me tell you how many "teacher" type gifts I was given. Mugs, ornaments, random knickknacks.

Oh, how cute.

And useless.

Yes, here is where I sound like an ungrateful brat. But, really, unless the teacher is a first-year newbie, they probably already have all of that stuff. I was gifted with all that stuff when I was a student teacher and it was cute then, but after that, notsomuch.

I thought it was really nice any time any of my students thought to give me a gift, though.

And some of my favorite gifts didn't cost anything, like the parents who arranged to take my lunch duty for a week as a gift for teacher appreciation week or the mom who wrote me a four page handwritten letter thanking me for all that I did for her daughter.

Awwww.

There were some really good gifts that cost some serious money, too. Woohoo on spa gift certificates for a whole day of pampering and a beach bag full of everything you could possibly need for a day at the beach.

So now that I'm a parent, I feel the pressure to come up with a good gift for my boys' teachers.

I don't have serious cash to throw around, so I have to figure out how to do something nice for not very much money.

Due to all the germ-madness this year, this is what I came up with:

A Germ-Busting Bucket!

Forgive the craptastic job on the tissue paper- I really need to fix that.

I had three teachers to buy for.
Inside each bucket is:

Lysol sanitizing wipes- $2.92 x 3

Big bottle of GermX instant hand sanitizer- $1.98 x 3

Bottle of Chewable Vitamin C- $2 x 3 (found that bargain at Wally World)

Travel-size kleenx-$.99 for a pack of three

5 bags of Yogi brand tea: Cold Season $4.42 for one box, that I split in 3

On the sparkly tag, I wrote "Miss (insert teacher's name here)'s Germ-Busting Bucket."

So, that's three teacher gifts of something that I think they will actually use, for just over $20 total.

Um, not counting the buckets($2.50 each at Wally World- they have a cute lid with a snowflake on it), tissue paper, and the sparkly tags, which bring my total closer to $30. But, by the time that I was shopping for those items, I had picked up the older two from preschool and had three kids shopping with me, so I went for whatever I saw that I thought was reasonable, instead of shopping around for a better deal.

Feel free to steal this idea for your kids' teachers!

I think this is the wordiest I've been on a Wordful Wednesday.