A retiring teacher's gift from the whole class

Collect the children's words in one sitting, in class, the week you decide to do it. Photographs can come from parents afterwards and on a slower timetable — but a sentence a seven-year-old was going to write on Tuesday does not exist by Friday.

That inverts the usual order, and it is the right way round for this particular gift.

The words are the material here

Most group gifts are assembled from photographs, with text as a caption. A class gift is the other way round. The photographs available are usually a handful of school ones that look like every other school photograph, and the thing that makes this piece specific is what thirty children actually say.

She let me sit at the front when I couldn't see. He did the voices. She never once said my name wrong. None of that is in any photograph, and none of it survives being remembered a month later.

How to run the collection

Ten minutes with paper, in class, is more effective than any digital request. Ask for one sentence each, and give the prompt narrowly — something she did works far better than what you'll miss, which produces thirty variations of "I'll miss you."

Photographs then come from parents on a separate ask, which is a different group of people on a different timetable and should not be tangled with the first.

What to do about the ones who write nothing

Some children will write a line and some will write a paragraph and one will draw a dog. Take all of it. A gift from a whole class is not improved by evening out the contributions, and the unevenness is a fair description of a class.

Keeping it out of the memory box

A retirement piece for a teacher competes with thirty years of mugs, cards and framed certificates, most of which end up in a box. The ones that stay on a wall are the ones that are about the person rather than the role — so avoid the year, avoid the number of years served, and avoid the school crest.

The photograph and what the children said about it are what still work in five years, when the leaving assembly is a long way off. Signature is the size a class usually chooses.