Valentine’s Day Gifts for School

Let's talk about Valentine's Day gifts for school staff members, classmates, and/or teachers. My daughter is in the special education program at our school so she has a lot of staff members she interacts with. For Valentine's Day, to show our appreciation, I like to make sure I cover as many of her adults as possible, which ends up being about 17 adults. On top of that, she has 19 classmates that need Valentines. That makes around 36 people total. I like to give something meaningful, but also not super expensive. I'm going to show you today what I'm using as both teacher and staff gifts as well as little things we've put together classmates in the past.

I've done different kinds of things for her classmates over the years but this year I'm sticking to candy with the cute little Valentine she chose. I decided against toys or knickknacks because after living in Argentina for six months in a little apartment, I realized we have SO much unnecessary junk and I just want to do a huge purge. I'm trying to keep the "stuff" to a minimum for other people too. My daughter absolutely loves animals so we got valentines that came with a cute animal sticker pack each. We added a few chocolate kisses to the bags and tied them off with the ties that came with the bags.

For the teacher gifts, I am using a Valentine's Day heart mold and am going to make some soap. If you've been following me for a little while, you know I have been making soap for teacher gifts for a little while now. It is just a really fun and inexpensive way to show appreciation. I love that it can be used but won't add clutter to someone's house.

I already had a giant brick the soap base before I started. In order to get the soap base into the heart mold, I cut it up into about one inch blocks, and then separated it out and put it in the microwave to melt it down. The best way to do this is in 20 second intervals so you can monitor how the glycerin is melting and continually stir it so it doesn't burn. I separated it out into multiple batches so I could do multiple colors of soap instead of doing it all the same color. Once all the glycerin was melted, I was able to start stirring in the colors. I had a box of powder coloring that I am able add to pretty much anything.

For this first batch I used “deep red”. I started small and just poured a little bit of coloring in, probably about two teaspoons, and then stirred it until it was smooth. I had to move pretty quickly when I did this because the glycerin will start to harden as it cools down. For this first round of soap, I only filled the molds around 2/3 of the way full with the glycerin to harden. For the next batch, I' used “peach”, doing the same thing as before and mixed in about 2 teaspoons of the colored powder. The third batch I used the “rose red”, which was definitely purple, not red.

After an hour, they were all hardened and I was able to take them out of the mold. While doing this I discovered that there were some that were thinner than others. I decided I liked the thinner ones because I could make more of them and they would be more likely to be used during the Valentine season. So, I put them back into the microwave, melted them back down and filled them 2/3 of the way full like I did with the previous ones. I repeated this all of the hearts and ended up with 17 hearts total, which was perfect.

I got cute cellophane bags with little hearts on them, as well as Hershey's chocolate kisses. I placed each heart into a cellophane bag with about six or seven kisses and then tied them off using the ties that came with the bags. Despite not having a scent this year (I only had Christmas scents on hand), I really love how these little gifts turned out. I like how they’re thoughtful, but not over the top and we hope her teachers will love them!