1. Photo Albums
We started with a standard photo album that holds 4x6 photos and took a photo of each student in the same location at school (in our case with a handprint flag as our background). Then each student wrote a personal thank-you note with a special memory to the teacher on a colored 4x6 index card and dressed it up with school stickers. We slid the child's photo in the top slot of the page and the card in the slot beneath it. For the cover we used a class photo copied on the computer. We also added field-trip and class-parties photos. The teacher just cried when she saw it. (Choose the album first so you can take the photos in the right direction. No reason you can't use pretty stationery for the messages; we chose the index cards because they had lines and matched the photo size.)
Variation: I purchased a three-ring photo album and additional sheets and gave each student a page with instructions. Each child drew a picture of a favorite activity/song/craft for one side and included a picture of themselves (photo or handrawn) for the other. They decorated the pages with stickers, pictures, poems, whatever they wanted. I put the finished pages back in the book, along with a poem about teachers and a cover page. The teacher LOVED it. Cried all over the place!
2. Scrapbooks with Questions
I sent home an empty page and about 25 questions for each child to answer and return to me. What did you like best about your teacher? What do you want to be when you grow up? What would you buy if you had $5 to spend today? What was your favorite subject? What did you learn this year? How would you change the world? What would you like to invent? What animal would you like to be? Is there anything that you would like to tell Ms. Williams about being in her class?
Students included their name and a picture if possible. I typed all the questions and answers and added some scrapbook touches. Each child had a two-page spread: the left side was what I scrapped for them, including their name and eight of the questions specifically about them. The right side was the page they did themselves.
I then combined the answers from all the kids and scrapped 13 more pages. The question was at the top, then all the kids' answers below. We also included a few pages of school parties and Halloween costumes. The final page was all of their signatures.
The teacher cried and said she would never forget this class. Nearly all the parents ended up with a copy of some sort ... we made color copies, black-and-white copies, or scanned images on a CD of the whole book to keep for themselves. Two years later, my daughter and I still read it and laugh at all the answers.
Variation: I gave each child some starter sentences, like "What I like about Miss X is ...," or "My teacher loves it when I ...," or "The funniest thing that happened in class was ..." If there was time they colored or drew on it too. I then took all of the sheets and laminated them.
Variation: I divided the book into sections: "Laughter," "Learning," "Life Lessons," "Love," and told the children they could choose one or more of these topics to write about. This worked really well for a teacher who was retiring, and we got kids from different years to contribute.
