Bake Your Teacher a Thank You

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Gingersnaps Cookie Jars at School

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Bake Your Teachers a Thank You!: A Blueprint

We all know how hard our teachers work, right? When people say that being a parent is the toughest job in the world, I think they may not have given teaching a hard and close enough look. Let’s show these teachers some love!

My New Favorite Oatmeal Cookies / Sarah Crowder / Katie Workman / themom100.com

Baking Your Teachers a Thank You is simple (I promise), and with a bunch of parents pitching in, it’s a heartfelt way to show the school staff how much you value all they do for your kids (and if the baking is spread out over a bunch of families, it’s an easy way to spread a lot of gratitude!).

Chewy Sugar Cookies

How to Organize a Baking Thank You in Your School

Here’s what you do:

  1. Choose a recipe, either Chocolate Chip Cookies, Gingersnaps, or Sugar Cookies from The Mom 100 Cookbook, or pick one of your own favorite recipes.
  2. Choose a day during National Teacher Appreciation Week (May 6-10), or any other day to designate as “Bake Your Teacher a Thank You” Day.
  3. If you are looking for extra help: two weeks before the date, send an email blast out to the parent body of your school, and asking for volunteer bakers. You may want to let people know how many volunteers you are looking for, based on the number of cookies you want to bring in. For a sample email, click here.
  4. 7-10 days before the designated date, send the selected recipe to the volunteer parents, along with instructions for dropping off the cookies at a determined spot the morning of Bake Your Teacher a Thank You Day.
  5. 1-2 days before the date, make sure you have a large cookie jar or two or three (depending on the size of your school). Print the cookie label for the selected cookie(s), with a list of ingredients. Attach the label(s) to the jar(s) with tape.
  6. The morning of Cookie Day, have a volunteer or two available to collect the cookies as they are dropped off in the designated spot, fill the jars with the cookies, and place them in the chosen spots where the teachers and staff can help themselves!
  7. Repeat as needed! This has been such a hit in our school that we quickly turned it into “Cookie of the Month Day”, and every month families from a different grade do the baking, so each grade is only asked to bake once a year.

My New Favorite Oatmeal Cookies / Sarah Crowder / Katie Workman / themom100.com

Pretty easy, right? And a lot of bang for your staff and teacher appreciation buck, I can tell you that. You can post your cookie photos to The Mom 100 wall on Facebook, comment at TheMom100.com, or post to InstagramTwitter, or Pinterest using the #BakeAThankYou hashtag. Even email me the photos! I’m quite chatty so you’ll likely hear back.

Cookie recipes:
Big Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chewy Sugar Cookies
Gingersnaps

These are the two well-used, much-loved cookie jars at my kids’ school

 

About Katie Workman

Katie Workman is a cook, a writer, a mother of two, an activist in hunger issues, and an enthusiastic advocate for family meals, which is the inspiration behind her two beloved cookbooks, Dinner Solved! and The Mom 100 Cookbook.

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12 Comments

  1. I absolutely love this idea! With teacher appreciation day coming up, there’s plenty of time to pull it off. Do you know where you got the jars pictured?

    1. Home Goods! But a long while ago….though they always have good stuff. I also love World Market.

    1. We do it about once a month at my kids’ school. You get into a rhythm, and we ask for volunteers grade by grade so parents don’t feel like they are being harrangued every month. It’s such a joyful project (and we eat the really broken ones).

  2. Also recruit some parents whose kids have food allergies to choose a recipe and have a jar for a dairy free, gluten free cookie!

  3. I think the spreading it over the year is a neat idea. When my boys were younger we had an entire week worth of menus and food brought in. As they have gotten older the upper schools don’t do it as much. I just love to do it when I feel like it. If I know a particular teacher is having a difficult day—I pick them up a coffee or a pastry or I may take the class Popsicles during last period. I have even been known to buy a teacher lunch if they are at the register at the same time as I am-even if they aren’t one of my kids teachers. I am thinking of making Whoopie Pies for teachers this year :) Great young feeling dessert that brings out a smile!

  4. We celebrate Teacher Appreciation 3x throughout the year. This year, we had a group of volunteers make soup (4 recipes, we were assigned) and brought that for the teachers to take home after a long day of teaching our kids! Next trimester, we had a during-school luncheon (one year, we had students from a local massage school come give 5 minute chair massages during lunch) and the last trimester we did an After School Snack–cookies, something salty and a cooler of drinks in the Teacher work room.

    1. Those ideas are fantastic! Love the chair massages. We’ve done a lunch at the lower school, too, and a Valentine’s Day tea at the bigger school, and a few other things. It’s amazing how much the teachers and staff appreciate it, isn’t it?