I never felt I had to give a gift but I like showing my heartfelt appreciation.
I wanted to share this for those of you who might never be enclosed in a roomful of these little people:
I used to take my son, my beautiful, wonderful, firstborn child to elementary school and drop him off. I would apologize to the teacher before school started because I knew it was going to be a tough day. My son was a handful. His grandmother describes him as being born without a "sitter". He's ADHD and we really did let him live but somedays it was close. He's now 25. He wasn't terrible in the sense of bad, he just needed a lot of redirection and patience. He exhaused me and I own him. His teachers weren't paid near enough and they were saints. Every year we had him write a letter to his teacher at the end of the year thanking them and telling her/him what was his favorite part of class. Sometimes those letters were pretty funny.
I recently ran into my son's 1st grade teacher, and it is amazing that she is still teaching 1st grade, this is her last year (44 years in a classroom, she's amazing) and she still remembers him. It makes me wonder just what he had done to stick in her mind so long. I hope it wasn't too painful.