Gifts for the teachers!

I thought I had got away lightly this year with gifts and then I remembered the teachers…I should give some gifts to the teachers…
Having two kids in different schools (one big school and one pre-school), plus other settings like after school club and nursery means lots of teachers/ people involved in their care.  It would be pretty easy to go out and buy a big box of chocolates for each setting and be done with it, but I can well imagine they are overflowing with big boxes of chocolates and thought it would be nice to do something a bit different…
I do appreciate the hard work and care that these people have put into looking after my children and I do want to acknowledge it in some way. I was thinking that actually the best gift to a teacher would probably be to go and help at school every so often and I might volunteer for that next year…  In the meantime though I decided to bake chocolate brownie balls and to take cuttings from some cacti I already had and re-pot them into glass jars.
To make the cactus jars pictured above:
  1. Take some empty jam jars and peel/ scrub off the labels (soaking in water and scrubbing with bicarbonate of soda did the trick for me – eventually)
  2. Cut strips of green card, wind them around the jars and stick them down with double sided sticky tape at one end.
  3. Fill the jars with a layer of stones to allow for drainage when the cacti get watered
  4. Add some cactus compost to the jars
  5. Take cuttings from the large cacti and put them in the soil
  6. Add another layer of stones on top of the soil to hold the cacti in place

I then tied some gift tags on, which I got my older son to write a message to each of his teachers in.

Sustainable gift wrap course
Last year I did something similar with aloe vera plants.  I think any plant which has babies/ can be taken cuttings of which is re-potted in this way makes a very thrifty and thoughtful gift – let’s hope the teachers like them!
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This has been shared at Waste Not Wednesday