Teacher’s End Of Term Gifts: Beautiful Personalised Notebook and Pen

I’d always intended to get around to making gifts for the teachers of my little boy’s nursery, as we have handmade them for every gifting occasion for the past two and a half years that he has attended.

This year, however, we did not get a chance to say goodbye. And it should have been a proper goodbye, as my son and his friends move from a pre-school setting to stating the great adventure of primary school in September. However, he fell ill at the very beginning of March, and before he had time to get well, his nursery (along with the rest of the schools and nurseries in the UK) closed due to Covid-19. It was a temporary closure, and I really do think that many people expected it to be back open in a few weeks, but it was not to open again this academic year.

My little boy did not get to say goodbye to his friends and teachers. He didn’t get to collect any of his work or even his belongings. It all stopped very suddenly. There was no end of term party, and no opportunity to pass on a small gift and word of thanks to those six teachers who treated him with kindness and respect whilst they taught and encouraged him.

Soon there will be a small, distanced meeting to say goodbye properly, A small and fleeting opportunity to pass on best wishes for the future and to say thank you, so we I have put together a small gift for each of the teachers that have been by my son’s side throughout his days at nursery.

We’ve decided to take notebooks and matching pens as end-of-term gifts. All in purple (my little lad’s favourite colour) and with personalised covers, each different.

The covers were designed and converted to cut paths in Adobe Illustrator, importing the text as vectors rather than trying to resize in the Cricut native software, and the resulting designs cut from the most wonderful iridescent vinyl.

I love this vinyl for the ever shifting rainbow of colours that catch your eye from different angles, and thought it would suit the vibrant personalities at the nursery, and hopefully prove to be a useful gift, with the matching pen always at hand, in the little elastic pen loop.

Even though it will be at a distance, I hope that the opportunity to pass these to his teachers and say ‘goodbye’ will give us the chance to draw a happy line under our time with the local nursery. We’ll be keeping in touch with the manager as I run the nursery website, but it will be good for our soon-to-be Primary School Adventurer to mark his time leaving one place, ready to start the next, in circumstances more challenging than they might usually be.