My mom raised 4 kids, so we ended up getting a pretty good collection of Halloween junk (you know those small pumpkin buckets people fill with candy, window clings we never even used, stickers my mom had gotten during the after-Halloween sale, etc). One summer, we went through all our holiday boxes (everything from Christmas and Valentine’s Day to St. Patrick’s and 4th of July) and found tons of stuff that was still good that we weren’t ever going to use and wasn’t worth holding on to for the future grandkids. So we came up with a brilliant plan… use them to fill the “treasure chest” in my mom’s classroom! We had so much stuff from all the holidays that she gave out tons of prizes all the time for good behavior and she didn’t have to buy anything from teacher catalogs or Oriental Trading Company for an entire year! So ask around… see if anyone has unused (or slightly used, depending on the item) stuff they’d like to donate to your classroom!

Some teachers celebrate birthdays in their classrooms. There are many different ways to celebrate birthdays that don’t fall during the school year. Here’s how I deal with birthdays as a an upper grade teacher:

I designate one day during the school year to celebrate summer birthdays. This past year, I chose the last day before Christmas break. The day was pretty much wasted anyway, since the kids can’t concentrate right before Christmas and they’re all distracted by the upcoming vacation. I told the students with summer birthdays that they could bring in a birthday treat and we would sing to all of them. So, a midst all the chaos of the holidays (we had a party in the afternoon), all the birthday kids brought out their treats to share and we sang to them. It was nice to combine it with the party because it was less distracting than celebrating summer birthdays on a day we were trying our best to be productive. The kids didn’t seem to notice it was combined with anything else, so they all felt special.