Leaving gift for nursery staff - ideas please ?

[helencw77]

My dd2 is leaving nursery on Thursday, she is 2.5 years old and is leaving because I have been made redundant (am also 38 weeks pregnant, so am in fact looking forward to having a bit of time off with the children before looking for something else).

My ds (now 6) and dd (nearly 5) also went to the same nursery, so we have been with them for 6 years and they have been fantastic, I cannot fault them.

I would like to get the staff a gift, there are five rooms and almost every member of staff has taken care of one or other, (or all) of my children at one point or another (they have a very low staff turnover).

Instead of maybe spending £10 each on 10-15 little gifts, I was thinking I could either spend £30 on a gift for each room (the staff, not the children, they have hundreds of toys !) or spend £150 on one big gift, or give them vouchers or something.

Does anybody have any ideas of what might make a good "room" gift, or an overall big gift for the nursery...........? Or are vouchers good enough ?

I bought a wee bench for the garden for the kids to sit on as a wee friendship bench! I also bought a shopping trolley (DD's choice) from DD and a few big boxes of chocs for all the staff. They loved it and all the children wanted to sit on the bench when we brought it in!

something nice for staff room (cushions/radio - obviously you would need to know what its like but usually they are not great!)? in the past parents have given money towards night out, wine, chocs. To be honest we love it when we get a really nice thank you letter, it means so much, especially when they take the time to remember significant events in each of the rooms

There are some fab people on ebay who make little plaque things out of fimo...(badly described lol) and plates. For dd's nursery I had a plate painted with the name of the nursery, the 3 teachers represented surrounded by the kids and the schoolbus, and for the driver himself, a little plaque to hang in his bus of himself, the yellow bus and the kids poking out.

If you search "teacher leaving present" they come up.

Bucharest thats so lovely!

Am dashing out to work, but will post later with ebay user name that made them for me, if I can find it.