A Custom Song for Teacher Appreciation Week

You are the room parent, there are nineteen families on the thread, and the collection has reached an amount that buys either a large gift card or something that outlasts the week. Here is the second option, and it costs less than the card: a song written out of what the kids actually said about her.

Collecting it takes one afternoon. Ask each child the same question and write the answer down exactly as it comes out. Ask for the small stuff, the voice she does for the wolf, the jar of erasers shaped like animals, the line she says so often that the whole class says it with her, the week the class hamster was sick. Do not tidy any of it up. The strange grammar is the best part of the whole thing.

Send us the list. We write and produce a song built from their lines, with her name and the school year in it, and we can work in the room number or what the class calls itself so it belongs to this group and no other. What she gets is a gift that came from twenty-two children rather than from one adult's checkbook.

The hard part is the room. This gets played in front of the class, the other parents and possibly the principal, so it cannot be a private note read aloud. Built out of what twenty-two kids said, the material belongs to everybody standing there rather than to one parent.

An original, studio-quality song from your details, $19.99, delivered by email within 24 hours, so a Thursday deadline is fine.

Start the order, then send the kids' answers exactly as they said them.