Kindergarten Teacher School Supplies Gift Box #BagItForward

Whew! We’ve made it through the first two weeks of Kinder­garten! Big Brother seems to be grow­ing more com­fort­able & con­fi­dent and we’ve worked out a new sched­ule at home that seems to be work­ing pretty well. We ended this two week mark by bring­ing in a big sur­prise to his whole pod of Kinder­garten teach­ers! I fig­ured a box full of school sup­plies would be a very wel­come gift, espe­cially on a Fri­day after­noon!

I made this sup­plies gift pack as part of the Elmer’s Bag It For­ward pro­gram! As a for­mer teacher (I taught high school biol­ogy until just after Lit­tle Brother was born), I know first hand how much many teach­ers end up spend­ing of their own money on var­i­ous class­room mate­ri­als. So, I love the idea of bag­ging it for­ward and giv­ing back to teach­ers. Last year, I bagged it for­ward to my for­mer col­leagues with a fun bag of teacher good­ies. But, with Big Brother in school now, the obvi­ous choice was his teachers!

We headed to Wal­mart to get sup­plies (which, by the way, has a deal for a free 5x7 photo this month. Go to: Walmart.com/photo for details) and found lots of stuff. Elmer’s involve­ment with giv­ing back was evi­dent as soon as we walked in the door, with a school sup­ply dona­tion bin & spon­sored sup­ply list sta­tion. This year, Elmer’s is doing some­thing extra with the free 1st Day mobile app. Right on the top of the school sup­ply list sta­tion, there was infor­ma­tion about the app with a QR code to down­load it (down­load­ing it was really easy). The app enables par­ents to cap­ture those price­less “1st day” moments and it also pro­vides teach­ers a unique plat­form to share pho­tos of their class­rooms, school projects and more with fam­ily and friends. The con­cept of the app is really cool by itself. But, what I espe­cially love is that for every photo uploaded, Elmer’s will donate one prod­uct to The Kids in Need Foun­da­tion (up to 200,000 prod­ucts)! Upload­ing a free app & snap­ping a photo is a super easy way to donate to a great orga­ni­za­tion! Love that!

After spend­ing some time sort­ing through the abun­dance of school sup­plies in the store, we ended up grab­bing quite a few sup­plies that were on the requested sup­ply list and then a few good­ies just for the teach­ers. For more from our trip, you can check out my Google+ story here.

I pack­aged every­thing up in a large file crate. I put paper tow­els & tis­sue boxes in the crate first. Then, I filled it up with the smaller good­ies–lots of Elmer’s glue (the kid­dos go through this SO fast), pen­cils, crayons, etc. There were also adorable notepads for the teach­ers, pens just for them, and some candy for good mea­sure! Once it was all sit­u­ated in the crate the way I wanted, I wrapped up the whole bin with clear cel­lo­phane. Then, we tied on some kid scis­sors & water­color paints on as part of the bow and attached one notepad to the front with a lit­tle note!

Big Brother and I then took it in to the whole Kinder­garten pod on Fri­day after­noon. All the teach­ers were so delighted! It was fun to see their reac­tions and it was great for Big Brother to have that inter­ac­tion with them! They seemed to love every­thing so much! Will YOU (or have you) Bagged It Forward?!

For more Bag It For­ward ideas, check out this Pin­ter­est board. And, for more from Elmer’s fol­low them on Face­book and/or Twit­ter

Dis­clo­sure: I am a mem­ber of the Col­lec­tive Bias™ Social Fab­ric® Com­mu­nity.  This shop has been com­pen­sated as part of a social shop­per insights study for Col­lec­tive Bias™ and and Elmer’s.  #Bag­It­For­ward #CBias #Social­Fab­ric. As always, all opin­ions & expe­ri­ences are my own.