Teacher Gift


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Happy Holidays: Thoughtful Teacher Gifts Scholastic Home | About Us | Site Map Search | Privacy | Customer Service Get Your Free Parent Newsletter Sign Up Now Families Home Your Early Learner Your School-Age Child Family Matters Book Fairs Book Clubs RAISING KIDS TODAY THE RIGHT STUFF PARENT GUIDES ALL ABOUT READING SPONSORS & PARTNERS Shop by Age Birth-2 3-5 6-8 9-12 Specialty Shops Parent and Child Expert Picks See all Brands Neurosmith Fisher Price See all Learn It ABCs & 123s Sights, Sounds & More See all Shop by Department Books Toys & Games Software Videos & Music -- Celebrate Teachers with Thoughtful Gifts Skip the "#1 Teacher" knick-knacks — try these winners instead. By Toby Leah Bochan The holidays are a perfect time to show your child's teachers how much you appreciate all they do. So what do teachers really want? Favorite gifts cited were candles, plants, candy, and fruit baskets, but we've gathered up some even better — and sometimes cheaper — ideas that are sure-fire teacher winners and heart-warmers. 1. Write from the Heart "I know it's corny, but getting a thoughtful thank-you card from a student is a hundred times better than a bottle of perfume or a knick-knack," Kate, a 7th-grade social studies teacher reports, echoing a common sentiment. It may seem simple, but a poem or letter of thanks from your child is a gesture that's truly appreciated. Have him tell a story about a special moment during the school year, or about what school would be like without a favorite teacher. As for you, consider writing a letter to the principal lauding a teacher's good work and mailing a copy to that teacher. Or if you feel a teacher is especially noteworthy, take the initiative to nominate her for an award such as Scholastic's National Teacher of the Year Award . 2. Get Together and Give Get parents and children of a grade (or even several!) together to work up a sweat while doing something nice for teachers. Organize a free car wash just for teachers in the school, or clean and spruce up the teacher break room with wildflowers and fresh-baked goodies. If parents can volunteer in the classroom and take over for a few hours, put together a luncheon for all the teachers so they can really sit down and relax for awhile together. Have each class take on a task such as making centerpieces, place cards or tablecloths while parents take on food duty, bringing in favorite dishes to share. 3. Gifts from the Class Again and again, when asked what holiday gifts meant the most to them, teachers answered, "something handmade by the class," whether it be a poster with every child's handprint under a "thank you" banner, cookies made by tiny hands, or a simple framed class photo signed by the children. Another great cooperative class ideas is to have each child create a flower out of cardboard and paint, or wires and fabric, and create a bouquet that will brighten the winter days. 4. Give to the Classroom Many teachers pay for school supplies out of their own pockets, so a gift basket filled with colorful pens, paper clips, post-its, stickers, stamps, and other office goodies is always a favorite gift. Calendars and any items that help the teacher stay organized are also great. If you can organize the parents of the class, ask the teacher for a "wish-list" of books (and even software and videos) and assign parents a book each to create a new classroom library. 5. Make it Personal Teachers have lives outside the classroom and many of them have hobbies and collections. Find out what activities your child's teacher participates in after school and really show them you care about them as people, adding a snow-globe to a growing collection, giving a skein of pretty yarn to a knitter, or a box of golf balls to a golfer. If you can't ferret out this information, a popular collectable gift to give is a Christmas ornament, which can be handmade or personalized by a child. 6. Treat Teachers like Royalty Let teachers know that you appreciate all those long hours on their feet and at their desks by giving them the treats they may not give themselves. A pedicure or massage is a great gift. Get parents to chip in for a day at a local spa, tickets to the theater, or a gift certificate to a first-rate restaurant so he can really escape the stresses of school life. Or for a simpler escape, gift certificates for a movie or video rentals — perhaps tied up with a box of candy or popcorn — will surely be appreciated. Back to top Introduction Calendar Articles Printables Booklists The PTA: Over a Century of Accomplishments Since its founding in 1897, the PTA has been involved in a lot of important programs and accomplished a lot, including: Lobbying for child labor laws Helping launch the federal lunch program in 1946 Participating in field testing of polio vaccine & securing it for all school children Spearheading the National Coalition for the Prevention of Drug & Alcohol Abuse Developing Respecting Differences to promote diversity & inclusiveness in school Fighting for automobile safety belt & child restraint legislation Initiating nation-wide anti-violence campaign Partnering in 2002 with the Kaiser Foundation to create a guide on talking about sex with children -- Back To Basics Toys Choose from a large collection of the classic toys you loved as a kid. From Lincoln Logs to Radio Flyer Wagons, Back To Basics Toys has it all! Go Now ALL ABOUT READING Make reading a part of your child's life! 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Executive Golf Gifts - Gifts BW gifts | gifts Resources | Add URL Wine Gifts & Baskets From the casual wine drinker to the serious enthusiast, we have a gift that will make them smile. Our selection includes premium wine, gourmet baskets, distinctive champagne sets & the very finest California and Northwest wines. Executive Golf Gifts Articles Gifts for great bosses Every once in awhile you find yourself working for a great boss. Here are some gifts to show how much you appreciate him or her....( Continue Reading ) Gift ideas for Dads Find unique gift ideas for your dad. Help him enjoy his home office every day of the year. Let your Dad know he's special....( Continue Reading ) Gift ideas for Dads Find unique gift ideas for your dad. Help him enjoy his home office every day of the year. Let your Dad know he's special....( Continue Reading ) Dad's Day Gifts for Managers Hand picked choices of gifts for managers who are or will be dads or fathers...( Continue Reading ) Father's Day Retail Research A majority of Americans celebrate Father?s Day with a gift, according to new research about gift giving from Unity Marketing. The typical gift-giver spends $80 on Father?s Day, based on a survey among 950 serious gift-givers who spent over $250 thr...( Continue Reading ) Executive Golf Gifts Directory Links gifts for musicians gifts for new mothers online birthday gifts e mail gifts christmas gifts for women send gifts to hyderabad shopping for gifts naughty valentines gifts unique gifts online professional gift baskets harry and david gift baskets gifts in kind international appreciation gifts hawaiian baby gifts lyrics simple gifts best gifts for dad gift baskets in michigan gifts for wedding anniversary birthday gifts for children 70th birthday gifts simple christmas gifts indian gifts online gifts for weeding anniversary gifts gifts for easter holiday gifts for him personalized family gifts gifts for college students peterboro baskets baseball coaches gifts gifts and gags homemade easter baskets valentine day gifts for guys valentines day gifts and ideas fall gift baskets girl gifts wedding gifts for bride staff appreciation gifts orange county gift baskets dinner party gifts gifts for him fine crystal wedding gifts craft ideas for gifts recognition gifts wedding flower girl baskets Popular Search Terms: Gifts BW © 2004 Gifts BW All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All Rights Reserved. This site is not related to Brajeshwar or Brajeshwar.com in anyway, shape or form
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Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Creative Gifts Games at Epinions.com Join Epinions | Help | Sign In All Categories Beauty Books Business & Technology Cars & Motorsports Computer Hardware Education Electronics Games Gourmet Health Home & Garden Hotels & Travel Kids & Family Magazines & Newspapers Movies Music Musical Equipment Online Stores & Services Outdoor Gear Personal Finance Pets Restaurants & Gourmet Software Sporting Goods ---------------------------------- Related Deals Home > Kids & Family > Toys We found 1 result for , Games, Creative Gifts Search Results Showing 1 item Hide photos Sort by Name or Rating Sort by Price See specs Creative Gifts Tic-Tac-Toe Game Model 03179 Games · Creative Gifts Showing 1 item Featured Resources Birthday Gifts & Ideas Unique gifts for their special day Tailored shopping awaits you www.personalshopper.com Creative Gift Ideas We help you find creative gifts. All ideas reviewed by our editors. www.FindGift.com Find Unique Gifts Gifts for Him. For Her. For Kids Free Wine Stopper with Purchase Wrapables.com Wal-Mart Toys & Games Buy Toys Shop for Every Day Low Prices! www.walmart.com/toys Wonderous Toys Time Magazine "Favorite Toy Sites" Yahoo! Top Service Award Store. www.quincyshop.com Help | Member Center | Message Boards | Privacy Statement | Site Index About Epinions | Careers | Contact Epinions | Merchant Center | New Merchants | Advertising Epinions | DealTime USA | DealTime UK | PriceTool | Shopping.com © 1999-2005 Epinions, Inc. Trademark Notice Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
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GDR Souvenirs - Birthday and Anniversary Presents Preface || Introduction || Official Gifts || Gifts to the Party Birthday Presents || Special Items || Site Map Information || Guestbook || Picture galerie Birthday and Anniversary Presents by Andreas Michaelis One might be forgiven for thinking that birthdays, even those that come in round figures, are essentially private or indeed contemplative occasions. Not so, if the birthday boy happens to be the head of a state or Party or is in some other way in the public eye. In that case, a birthday becomes a public event. The guests can no longer be hand-picked, nor the tidal wave of presents averted. Gifts made to GDR leaders, if they were of the right kind, tended to end up in the museum. They included both highly individual pieces and items off the mass production conveyor belts. These souvenirs sometimes commemorated significant social occasions, sometimes insignificant; some were presented by governments, some by ordinary working people; and, while some might be suited to the personality and office of a president, others were given in friendship or comradeship. Along with presents to mark birthdays or other occasions in the lives of the state and Party leaders, there are certain items that were presented by home or foreign givers on particular GDR anniversaries. Most of these, and the oldest too, were left by Wilhelm Pieck at his death. One remarkable for its origins was given to him in Moscow in December 1943: a desktop calendar handcrafted out of wood for the Communist leader by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The red crayon inscription reads: Unity and peace to the German people - Wilhelm Pieck - From antifascist prisoners of war in USSR p.o.w. camp 158. Three presents given to Wilhelm Pieck in Soviet exile in 1936, on his sixtieth birthday, have survived. They were made by Soviet industries, using material from the current production line, and represent a kind of gift that seems to have appeared for the first time in the USSR in the 20s. These presents signalled a deliberate rejection of feudal or bourgeois traditions and a liberation from the material and artistic values of an old societal system then supposed defunct, and their meaning to the recipient lay purely in their symbolic function. Doubtless it would be going too far to suggest that there was an individual artistic style of expression peculiar to socialism as practised in the Communist bloc countries - but it remains true that this kind of characteristic symbolic gift was in evidence in almost every east European country till the late 1980s. The workers at the factory or plant in question would normally be identified as the givers of presents of this sort. Thus Wilhelm Pieck was given a ball-bearing mount by the workforce at the 1st State Ball-Bearing Works, a clock (inevitably) by the workforce at the 2nd State Clock Factory in Moscow and a smoker's set made of cogwheels by the Sergo Orjonikidse Machine Tools Works. In 1954 the workers at Zeulenroda furniture factory took Pieck by surprise when they remembered an anniversary he had probably forgotten himself: in 1894, the President, then an apprentice carpenter, had joined the German Woodworkers' Association, and his fellows in the craft were keen to mark his diamond jubilee as an active member of the trade union movement. On the side of the chest they made to celebrate the occasion is an image of Stalinallee (Stalin Avenue) in East Berlin, which East Germany touted as the premier socialist street in the capital of the GDR. Naturally the Communist bloc had another tradition, first practised in the Soviet Union: the naming of cities, factories, co-operatives, streets and public amenities after prominent Communist personalities, often when they were still alive. A danger was concealed in this kind of honour, however. If a personality fell out of favour, or was downgraded by his successors, the names all had to be changed. Thus cities, works and streets named after Stalin were renamed almost immediately after the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, and Stalin memorials were toppled. Stalin was dropped from the leadership hall of fame. The boulevard once known as Stalin Avenue became Karl Marx Avenue, which it remains to this day (though the names of other leading Communists have been largely removed following the velvet revolution in eastern Europe). In 1946, for his seventieth birthday, Wilhelm Pieck, then leader of the German Communist Party in the Soviet zone of occupation, was given a number of china figurines and a metal sombrero by the Party's cell in Mexican exile. Rather more useful, no doubt, was a cigarette case embellished with portraits of Lenin and Stalin which he received from Soviet comrades for his seventy-fifth birthday. One motif that recurs insistently in the presents given to him on that birthday and his eightieth is the first of the GDR's five-year plans. It was launched in 1951 and declared over in 1955, ahead of schedule, the targets more than met. Even at that date, the propaganda that accompanied the beginnings of an East German planned economy could be grotesque, and the items that recollect this phase will doubtless tickle many now. It would only be fair, however, to bear in mind that in the first decade of the GDR's history the struggle to fulfil plans was accompanied by a genuine sense of a fresh start, a new and energetic departure - and in this respect it was finally a more honest thing than the ossified, dogmatic planned economy of the 70s and 80s,with its clichés and hot air. Slogans such as Peace - Reconstruction - Prosperity, or the five-year plan emblem together with its motto The key to our success, are eloquent not only of the political vocabulary favoured during the 50s but also of the hopes and longings of the East German people. Among the many activities mounted by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) was the Wilhelm-Pieck-Campaign , intended to prompt greater effort by the country's young people and the working population in general, to mark the President's eightieth birthday. On this occasion, the apprentices at the Bitterfeld electrochemicals combine gave Pieck a stylish folder containing documents and statements concerning their FDJ group. At their deaths, Pieck and Grotewohl left several hundred folders of this kind, with enough material for a hefty tome, or a feature-length satirical programme. Elsewhere, workers in factories set a good example in cost-cutting. If honorific gifts were produced in series, a given item could be made at a fraction of the cost of an individually-crafted piece. The figure of a muscular miner in a combative attitude, an optimistic expression firmly on his face, was far and away the most frequently given present for Pieck's eightieth birthday. He received numerous gifts from comrades in the Federal Republic too. Most of them were little items with some local connection, such as a figure of Roland from Bremen , or one of Hamburg's typical Hummel figures . The GDR leadership's duties routinely included visits to factories. These visits served primarily to demonstrate the closeness of the state and Party leadership to the working classes. In 1953, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl visited the Ernst Thälmann Polygraphics Works at Saalfeld. He may have been critical of the work being done by the graphic artists and designers there; at all events, for his sixtieth birthday the following year he was presented with an entire collection of draft designs for new product labels. In the 50s, in addition to the obligatory gift, a leader might be honoured by having a work team (at least) named after him. Long before he officially took over the reins of the state and Party, Walter Ulbricht was so popular that labour collectives bore his name as early as 1953. For his sixtieth birthday, one of his work teams presented him with a desktop set praising his endeavours on behalf of peace, unity, democracy and socialism. Ten years later, as chair of the GDR's Council of State, he received for the first time one of the traditional presents from the Soviet armed forces in Germany - generally bombastic and symbolically top-heavy affairs. That first gift was a model of a Soviet cosmonaut memorial. A present from the Soviet armed forces to Otto Grotewohl has survived too, a figure reaching for the stars and thus symbolizing humanity's unceasing striving after higher things - an allegory that recurs frequently in Communist and socialist iconography. The Honecker era, too, in due course provided the Deutsches Historisches Museum with a number of anniversary presents. The desk set given to Erich Honecker, on his sixtieth birthday, by Lieutenant Colonel Kurkotkin, commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces in Germany, and bearing a personal dedication, particularly intrigues all who see it. The martial character of the set was no doubt intended to convey that the SED First Secretary could count on the massed firepower of the Soviet Union behind him, and thus settle in to a quiet period in power. The composition - typical in approach, given its origin - does in fact include a number of useful items, regardless of its military character and offputting design: a radio, a thermometer in the TV mast, a calendar, and four ball-points disguised as missiles. Ten years later a Soviet-German joint-stock company, SDAG Wismut - which was the last company in East Germany to remain under partial Soviet administration and control (till 1990), because of the uranium it was mining - presented a conversation piece inspired by mining. The bismuth workers, honouring an established tradition, selected a particularly fine mineral sample. The musical box they built into the sample seems never to have been used. On the same occasion, Honecker was presented with a pick by the Senftenberg Brown Coal Combine. It was not to be the last he received in his lengthy career as head of state and Party. It was not only the leaders of state and Party that were given these heavily symbolic presents; the tradition was observed at every level of the state and Party hierarchy. Stasi boss Erich Mielke kept a trophy room, as it were, at his headquarters in Normannenstrasse. Numerous honorifics are now on display there, gifts to Mielke or the ministry on a variety of occasions. Some were passed on to the Stasi ministry's information centre, whence they were made over to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte in 1990. There are the usual plaques and tapestries, but one of the Stasi ministers birthday presents was a rather unusual model of an electric oven. In the GDR, 7 October was a national holiday, an annual celebration of the establishment of the first German workers' and peasants' state, and the date was marked with a grand parade, a government ceremony, and countless local festivities around the country. And every five years, on jubilee occasions, the state and Party leadership celebrated in lavish style. Leaders from friendly countries, and representatives from around the world, would pay their respects to the GDR. Again, it is the presents made by the Soviet armed forces that are especially striking. The model of the Soviet memorial in Treptow Park, which symbolizes the liberation of Germany from fascism and stresses the role played by the Red Army, was a gift to mark the GDR's silverjubilee in 1974. The outsized helm presented to Honecker on the 35th anniversary by the Schwerin SED regional leaders alluded to the well-worn image of Erich Honecker as the great helmsman of state. The accompanying letter is a gem, sparkling with all the routine phrases that had become de rigueur among the Party leadership echelons. The regional first secretary thanks our dear comrade Erich Honecker for his outstanding personal contribution to the conception and realisation of policies designed to assure the happiness of the people and the safeguarding of peace, and asserts that the people of our region are paying tribute to these fine socialist politics by making greater endeavours than ever before, in every field of society. By the time of the 40th anniversary celebrations, however, a gloomy knowledge of imminent upheaval darkened the leaders' festivities - though surely none of them could suspect at the time that it was to be the GDR's very last birthday.