Looking for inexpensive or free holiday gift ideas for your students this year? Read this post for some tried and true teacher favs!
My oldest son Nick (who is Christmas-obsessed and legit listens to Christmas music year round in his room while playing Fortnite) decorated our ENTIRE house for Christmas weeks ago when he was home with bronchitis. I mean he packed up Halloween decorations (it wasn’t even Halloween yet) and brought all the Christmas boxes and bins down from the attic. He set up decorations and trees around the house. Man, having a motivated teenager sure made it easy to decorate this year!
Since now is actually the time to start thinking about the holiday season, let’s talk student gifts. I always want to gift my students a little something, but need something cute and cheap. I have compiled a list of 10 cute (and inexpensive) gifts you can get your students this year.
10 Inexpensive Gift Ideas
- Personalized Dollar Tree Christmas Stocking. Use a paint pen to write students’ names. Hang the stockings in your classroom to add a festive touch, or just hand out before the holidays with some candy, cute pencil, pen, eraser, etc. inside.
- Gloves with Candy Canes inside. Walmart has 3 packs of gloves for $1.98.
- Dollar Tree word search books with a highlighter.
- Keychain pop-its. These can be found here on Amazon.
- Sketchbook with a pencil.
- A book. Scholastic books offer class sets within their book orders. You can also search for books at a discount store like Aldi, 5 Below, Ollies, etc.
- Board Game. I know board games are not cheap enough to buy for your entire class, but you can use the power of social media to get your friends/ family to sponsor a student in your classroom. Make a cute post about wanting to buy games for your students this year and ask friends/ family to choose a student number to buy for. Give a deadline and a drop-off location for all your donations.
- Make your own Farkle Game. Put 5 dice in a bag with directions to the game Farkle. (Find a free PDF directions page here.)
- Mason jars with hot cocoa mix.
- Personalized clipboard. I did this one year using my Circut machine. I simply cut out all my students’ names on vinyl and then stuck it to the clipboards. Easy peasy! My students loved using these during the school day the remainder of the year.
Listen, if you can’t afford gifts for your students this year, DO NOT FEEL GUILTY! You pour into those kiddos everyday in so many ways. There are plenty of free things you can do for your students if you want. Here are my favorite FREE student gift ideas.
3 FREE Gift Ideas
- Gift your students a special recess. Take your class outside and do something fun WITH them. Play a game of kickball, draw chalk with them, play a game of hide and go seek, etc. Your students will LOVE having you in on the fun. This is a great relationship builder too!
- Write an acrostic poem. Using the letters of each student’s first name, write something positive or that you notice about that child. Laminate the poem or make it into a bookmark.
- Gift your students a classroom coupon. You could even make a coupon book! Ideas include 10 minutes free time, sit by a friend, first in line for the day, etc. You could also do a class coupon for movie day, pajama day, game day, or extra technology time. Tie the coupon (or coupons) onto a candy cane or Christmas pencil.
I hope this post helped you narrow down your student gift search! Happy Holidays!
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