Welcome to December! Quite possibly the most difficult month to teach our awesome students. But do you know what makes it better: GIFTS. Gifts make this holiday season so much better and I’m not talking about buying gifts for other people. I’m not even talking about adorable and sometimes awkward gifts that we get from students. The gifts that I’m talking about are the gifts we actually give ourselves, and I’ve got five incredible opportunities for you to give yourself a gift that is absolutely going to make the holidays awesome.
Alright, so we are all very well aware of the stresses that come during this season. We’re stressed about finishing the second quarter. We’re stressed about the holidays. We’re stressed about finding the perfect gift for other people, planning the perfect meal, having a perfect party. Quite frankly, it makes me like.. it makes it hard for me to breathe. I love celebrating the holidays, but I’m a terrible gift giver. I’m just not good at it. I’m good with writing cards and making personalized messages for people. I’m really good at having quality time with people. But when it comes to material gifts, like straight-up, I’m terrible. It stresses me out. I want to just give everyone gift cards. I have been thinking about what I can do to make a really special holiday entry, and I realized that there are some really cool gifts that, we as teachers, can give ourselves. Gifts that are going to help us, not just during the holiday season, but especially when we come back from break. I have five of them for you, right here.
Five ideas that are absolutely going to make your holiday season full of joy!
The first one is from one of my favorite stores ever. Yeah the Dollar Tree, I love the Dollar Tree. If you’ve ever done professional development with me, you know I have an entire workshop on how you can increase engagement literally using only things from the Dollar Tree. We get stressed out about budget, but hello, $1.07 is in our budget. Gift number one, I actually have it in my hand right now. It’s what I call a positive affirmations pen, and I got this at the Dollar Tree. It writes like a pen, but at the top when you click the button, it actually shifts to positive affirmations on the screen. I click it, says “You go girl”, “You’re a boss,” and “Slay the Day.” I’m like yeah! We absolutely need this in our lives. Now I bought the female version of this, but there are other versions of this as well. If you’re having a bad time grading papers and you’re like oh snap I don’t know if I can do this, you just click your pen and it says “Hey, you rock.” YES, you keep grading. Maybe you’re writing a note to a parent, and you’re like, this isn’t going well, just click it and it says, “This girl can!” Oh my god, a $1.07, we all need this in our lives for sure! You don’t need to wrap it up. You don’t need to put it in a stocking. You just need to put it in your cart and pack it in your school bag, so when January rolls around you can start using it. You don’t have to wait till January though,I mean if you want to get one of these pens right now, you can use that to help through this tough month of teaching. Totally, an awesome opportunity to spend a buck and feel so positive every single time you need to. You just need to click the button, and you get a little boost. Every teacher needs that.
Gift number 2: I want you to go out and buy a gift card to the trashiest restaurant in your town. I mean, the place that sells the food that you absolutely shouldn’t eat, like trash food. The burger joint that’s just a grease pit or the place where everything is deep fried. If you don’t have any local specialties, go out and get you a $10 Taco Bell gift card. I want you to be proactive about having one of these gift cards, so when you have a terrible day at school, or you are just ready to go home and Netflix and not cook, you can just swipe that gift card and not feel guilty about it. We all deserve to eat off plan for one day, especially when life has us going crazy. We all deserve to say I’m not cooking, we’re getting burgers. I want you to go out and get a gift card, put that in your wallet and when you’re driving home from work, on those days (you’ll know in your heart when it’s time to cash that puppy in), you can just do it. Enjoy a greasy gordita crunch, enjoy a double decker burger. I don’t know what’s in your town, but if you need a cup of custard to get you through to the next day, you’re now being proactive about having that gift card. Oh my god it’s so fun. You’re Welcome!
The next gift is a subscription to Pandora Unlimited. Now that may seem kinda like a random choice, but here’s what’s up: I love listening to music to get me pumped up for the day. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the budget for Spotify. I just can’t do that. I think those subscriptions are like $12.99 a month. We are teachers, I’m not spending $12.99 a month on Spotify. But What I can afford is a $4.99 subscription to Pandora Unlimited, and here’s what you get with that: You get unlimited skips, so when you’re driving home from work or you’re driving to the school each morning, you can just skip until you find your favorite song. Another thing that’s really nice about this subscription is that it is completely AD free, so that means that you can use it in your classroom without being concerned about some wildly inappropriate AD popping on while you’re playing it in the background while the kids work. Pandora Unlimited can actually be edited so it doesn’t play any explicit songs or other songs that you would not want to come in during the streaming process. This is all for $4.99. What?!? Now this is not a sponsor thing for Pandora or anything like that. I’m not affiliated with them. I just love Pandora and I’ve been a Pandora user since basically my high school years, so I pledge my allegiance to them. Here is another cool thing, if you are active as a student, so if you are a teacher who’s also taking grad level courses or you are going back to school, you can get a Pandora Premium account for like half the price. Also, if you are military you get a massive discount on Pandora Premium accounts too. So I mean, check it out and start that jam session on your way to work!
We are now on number four. I want you to get on the Kohl’s, and get your Kohl’s Cash ready. I want you to go to the Walmart or somewhere where you can get some inexpensive clothing, but you’re not buying teacher clothing. You’re not doing like K12 professional gear. I want you to buy some clothing that’s going to gain you street cred with your kids. Maybe your kids, like my students right now, are really into like Champion. This was cool for sure in the 80s and 90s, and it’s making a huge comeback. I want you to get a Champion t-shirt, or maybe get a hoodie and I want you to wear your hood up all day in class. My students are doing this, so I am sure yours are too. Or maybe, our like, “No I don’t want a hoodie or a champion t-shirt, I need to get me a Hydro Flask and maybe you need to get some really solid stickers to add some flair to it. I want you to buy something that is going to gain you some serious street cred with your students. Depending on the age of your students, it will depend on what you actually get, maybe you just need a scrunchie. We need something to make sure kids now that we know what’s cool. Bust out that puka shell necklace, get your a WWJD bracelet, channel your inner 80s/90s self and rock these trends again. These trends are back and we need our kids to know, we lived through the original era of these. We understand the coolness of it all.
That brings us to number 5. What is something that you can get to actually boost your teacher life game. Something that’s going to help you in the classroom to increase engagement, to boost climate and culture in your school, to build better relationships with students: I think maybe, a book called Game Changes or The Rooted Classroom, or 180 days of Awesome, or the NEW 180 Days of Awesome Relationships. Maybe I’m a little biased, ok I probably am; but honestly, I think that these are all three great book options that we should treat ourselves to during the holiday. I’m a huge reader, and I just recently bought myself four new books that I want to dive into over break. I don’t know what you need right now, but I do think that books are great gifts to yourself. Honestly, I would be honored. I would be so stinking honored if you did pick up a copy of Game Changers or The Rooted Classroom or 180 days of Awesome from my website, because I truly do believe in the power of the stories and the strategies that are within each of those books. If you want to check those out, you can visit my website at monicagenta.com/books. There’s no time like the present, but I hope that these actually are presents to yourself, because guess what, you deserve it.
Teacher friends, I’m serious when I say these 5 gifts are going to bring enormous joy to this holiday season. I think we as teachers need that, we need to find as many opportunities to spread joy; but also, experience that for ourselves. I want you to know that I’m cheering you on as we enter these final few weeks of school. I want you to know that you deserve to have an incredible winter break. Spending it with family and friends and just embracing the fact that part of living this teacher life, means that we get time off.
Happy Holidays to all of you!
PS- You can get your copies of item number 5 right here! Don’t miss this awesome gift!