Gift Ideas for the Office Staff- Administrative Professionals Day

Administrative Professionals Day is right around the corner! At my school, we have outstanding office ladies. I truly feel that they are the glue that holds the school together.  These ladies field phone calls, calm down angry parents, deal with sick kids when the nurse it out, take care of behavior cases while they wait for admin., handle all the paper work, answer billions of questions…. all with a huge smile on their face. They are so helpful, friendly, and kind. 
In honor of them, we usually collect money from the staff so that we can all chip in to make them feel special. Instead of only celebrating for one day, we actually turn it into a week long celebration. This year, I had the honor to put together their gifts. 
Today I'm here to share them with you. A lot of these could easily be used for Teacher Appreciation week as well.

I got the cute tumblers from Target, you can find them here. I used my Silhouette Cameo  to cut out the names and designs from Vinyl Sheets . 

You can snag the labels here. 

I used EOS lip balm as the 'bomb'. You can pick that tag up here.

You can get this sign here.

Next up is an Ice Cream Sundae Kit:

Signs available here.

I hope you find some of these gift ideas useful! Let me know in the comment section if you end up trying any of these ideas out :) 

Aloha,

Holiday Gifts

Happy December, Friends! 

Today I am linking up with my blogging buddies from the Elementary Grapevine to present to you a Holiday Blog Hop!!

Today I will be sharing some gift ideas with you that I have done in the past.

Student Gifts

Each year, I order books from Scholastic and stock up on the multiplication flash cards from the Target dollar section. I will usually add in a candy cane, Christmas pencil, and some type of holiday straw into their gift bags. 

I also bake these melted snowman cookies for them. 

If you would like detailed directions on how to create these cookies, as well as an awesome sugar cookie recipe you can check out this post.

If you're interested in using these editable cookie bag toppers, you can download a free copy in my TPT store.

Parent Gifts

Each year my students make snowman finger printed ornaments to gift to their families. It is super simple and easy. I purchase clear plastic ornaments (because the glass ones easily shatter) and fill them with glitter (fake snow).

Faculty Gifts

I usually like to give something small to the office staff, custodians, counselors, etc. They help to ensure the school runs smoothly but often get overlooked. It can get a bit pricy when purchasing something for all of these people, so I usually like to bake something. 

One year I made some chocolate covered pretzels and decorated them with sprinkles. In addition I baked some brownies and added some candy canes to this cute holiday box and then tied it up with a cute bow.

Another idea is to make some puppy chow, add some holiday m&ms and throw them into a Mason Jar. This comes out SUPER CUTE and who doesn't like puppy chow?! 

In the back row of the photo above, I also used some large Mason jars and added dry cookie ingredients. I decided to do M&M cookies, since they're much more colorful than plain chocolate chips (although I believe they have red and green chocolate chips now!) 

I added some ribbon and tied on directions on how to prep. the cookies (along with the wet ingredients needed). You can snag the labels I used here. 

I hope you are able to use some of these ideas this holiday season! All of these gifts are easily adaptable for anyone :) What are your go-to holiday gifts? I'd love to hear in the comment section below! 

Head on over to Lory's blog to find out about Classroom Snowball Fights!! 

DIY December Linky #1: Melted Snowman Cookies

Happy Sunday!

This month I have been doing a lot of DIY and baking projects for the holidays. I decided that I wanted to share it with you all and since I know that you are all a bunch of creative and crafty teachers- I want to see what you've been DIY-ing this month! SO..I present to you a brand new Linky:

Yesterday, my baking buddy and I  (another teacher) got together to make some Melted Snowman Cookies for our students. 

I absolutely love baking and decorating cookies, so this was a totally fun project for me! 

We started off by making our sugar cookies from scratch. This was my first time making sugar cookies and it was pretty easy! I have a really yummy recipe if you're interested. 

Click the photo above to download a copy of this recipe :) 

We then used circle cutters to cut the dough-then baked the cookies. 

The cookies will need to stay in the oven for a bit longer than the 15 minutes the recipe suggests. We just took a peek into the oven to make sure they were browned around the edges. These are what our pre-decorated cookies looked like. 

We then made our frosting using water, meringue powder, and some powdered sugar. 

We had to experiment better with how we liked the frosting. As you can see..we originally tried frosting the entire cookie-but didn't like that. We ended up using a plastic baggie to outline the melted snow look. Make sure to pop the marshmallows on before your frosting hardens. 

We then added some food coloring to the frosting-and used plastic bags (instead of piping bags) to draw on the eyes, nose, arms, and buttons. 

You could get fancy and add scarves, bows, and earmuffs but we were running low on frosting since we made 75 cookies! 

We then bagged each cookie into a plastic Ziplock Sandwich bag..and added these cute topper tags. I absolutely love how they turned out! It makes the packaging look much fancier!

The back of the tag also lists the ingredients.

If you're interested in using these tags-you can download them for free in my TPT Store. This is an editable file (for ingredients and teacher name). Please leave some feedback if you do decide to use these tags :) 

If you'd like to share any of your DIY Holiday Projects from this month-or from the past I would love for you to link up below! I always love getting new ideas and definitely would like to add some new projects to my to-do list! If you don't have a blog-feel free to leave your ideas in the comment section :) 

Thank you for sharing and Happy DIY-ing!

Rules for this Linky:

1. Link the picture of your project to your blog post. 

2. Add the DIY December Linky button to your blog post with a link back to my page. 

3. Check out the other DIY Projects and leave some cheerful comments

Thanks so much for linking up!!

Holiday Ornaments

It is almost Christmas!! Time has really flew past me this year. I'm officially on winter break and enjoying every minute of it!! My first day of break though (actually first night), I ended up getting a mean stomach bug/flu :( I'm finally fully recovered and yesterday was my first day of actually eating real food besides soup and crackers. Despite the vomiting, chills, and high fever I am so thankful that my body held out on being sick until I went on break. It would have been horrible to get this during school, and there was no way I could have made it in to do any sub. plans. 

Anyways..if any of you are still in session, this could be a last minute project since it is very easy!! Otherwise, you can throw this in your bag of tricks for next year. Each year, my girlfriend and I do this same project for our kids to take home as gifts for their families. The students make snowman ornaments. Over the years we have really perfected these ornaments...if only we had our first attempt at those three years ago we'd probably laugh! Normally, I write the students names on the ornament but thought..hey these are going to their parents/families why not write Merry Christmas or Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian). So, this year the kids were able to choose what they would like written on their ornament along with a color. I'll try my best to show you what we did to create these cute little ornaments:

I went away with my handy dandy cricut to cut out letter using vinyl. Lucky me, I had my friend to help with the cricut cutting as well as the vinyl transferring...BUT her super sweet husband came home from work and did it ALL for us! He was watching  us and said we were transferring the vinyl the hard way...so he explained to us but we didn't understand what he was talking about so he decided to just take over! :) We were happy and went off to baking

Once the vinyl is all done, now come the work of the kiddos. All I did was paint each kids fingers then let them press it onto the ornament.

You need to let the fingerprints dry quite a bit before you allow the kids to draw on them. 

All you need are colorful sharpie pens and the kids can go away at designing their snowmen...

You could also add in fake snow from any craft store and I also added in some glitter. The glitter adds a nice touch because 1. who doesn't like glitter 2. the glitter sticks to the side of the ornaments and looks like falling snow! 

Just a suggestion if you decide to try this craft out next year..you definitely want to find PLASTIC ornaments. The glass ones will shatter VERY easily. 

We also got special boxes that fit these ornaments perfectly. The students decorated the boxes then we wrapped up the gifts. 

PS: I am totally jealous of cold weather right now. In Hawaii we're experiencing some cold weather in the 70's :) haha, hey this is semi-cold for us okay! It's really funny because it was like 70 the other night and everyone was walking around the mall all bundled up. I'm usually in California at this time of year and am totally missing the cold weather!! 

Wrapping up the Year w/some cute Gift Tags

I am exhausted!! This will be another short post. Last night, I went to Wal-Mart in search of a gift to give my kiddos for the last day of school. I saw some cute ideas on pinterest and put together a super cute and inexpensive gift for my students.

I just put a pack of kool-aid, a cool twisty straw and a cute note to the kids. This gift came out so cute and was oh so simple, perfect for last minute gifts :P  If you would like a copy of these tags and the notes I put inside (also from pinterest) head on over to my TPT store.