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Each week, Education World's "Best (Teaching) Idea Ever" feature highlights a favorite teacher-tested idea designed to help you teach a lesson, manage a classroom, communicate with parents, impress colleagues and administrators…and amaze them all with your energy and creativity! Included: A chance to share your best idea ever

At the end of each term, Janis Highley's first and second grade students throw a shower for their student teacher. Highley sends home a gift suggestion list that includes a range of ideas from stickers to books and invites parents to contribute anything the student teacher might be able to use. Cake and ice cream is served and the kids present the student teacher with the gifts. "The shower," Highley says, "is a great ending to a year of learning."

Karen Maitland also sent her student teacher off in style. She asked her sixth-grade students to each donate one item they thought would be useful to their intern when she begin working in her own classroom. "We left the ideas to the students so they could indulge their own creativity as to what THEY thought a teacher should have," Maitland noted. Besides pens, pencils, notepads, and sticky-notes, Maitland reported that her intern received a picture frame, desk 'toys', file boxes, rubber stamps and stamp pads, chocolate, highlighters, a sewing kit, a first aid kit, a white board with a planning calendar, gift certificates to the local coffee shop, and more. Some of the kids even wrote 'how to' suggestions, so the intern would be able to do some of the same activities with her new class she'd done with them.

Submitted by: Janis Highley, Battle Ground, Washington, and Karen Maitland, McKelvie Middle School, Bedford, New Hampshire.

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