Hey folks! What a crazy busy time it has been lately. School is getting so close to being out for summer and I may be more excited about it than the kiddo! Our Parent Teacher Organization has so many events planned from now until school gets out and it is keeping me on my toes. One of my favorite events of the whole school year is Teacher Appreciation Week! This year it is gonna be over the top…but I can’t spill the beans on the blog just yet, in case one of the teachers read this post. In the meantime, I thought I would share some of the lunch ideas we have done throughout the year over the next few posts. This may help give some of those PTO and PTA mommas browsing Pinterest some inspiration. First on the list…Teacher Appreciation Lunch Ideas Mexican Fiesta! There may be a recipe thrown in too!

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The first and most important thing is to decide on a theme. You can either theme the lunch around the food you want to serve or you can figure out food that will go with a theme you already have. In my experience with PTO, a lot of the food gets determined because of items we already have to decorate with or what moms have at home that we can use for free.  By using free items we can actually afford to have food catered. Other times if someone is donating food then we definitely will make our theme work based off of the food. For this luncheon we went for a Mexican Fiesta theme!

Once you have all of those things figured out it’s time to make a flyer or invitation.

Teacher Appreciation Lunch Ideas Mexican Fiesta!

Make your flyer go with your theme. These are really easy to create on your own. I use PicMonkey to design my flyers. There are tons of free features and you can even pull in your own fonts and clipart. Once the flyer has been created then it is emailed to all of the staff and posted on the lounge doors.

So the food has been determined, the theme has been determined, the flyer has been made…what next? It’s time to find the decorations. This is when an all call email goes out to the parent volunteers. Perfect chance to get your parents involved! We have one momma who really takes on the challenge of decorating for the lunches. Trissa has tons of stuff already which helps us out a lot. Sandra borrowed the sombreros from her church. That’s a good tip…church’s love to help provide items! It’s kinda hard to see in the picture but one momma brought in limes that had white flowers inserted. They were too cute!

Bottom line is use what you have and ask parents for ideas and things that they may have access to.

For this occasion we had the food catered in by a local Mexican Restaurant called Amigos Locos. You could also get volunteers to make and donate food. The catering saves us a ton of work though.

Fajitas were on the menu with all the fixings, chips, cheese dip, salsa, rice and beans!

For this event we wanted to save some money and asked parents to donate the desserts and drinks….

A really fun tool we use to get things donated is SignUpGenius!

It’s free and extremely simple to use!!! You create your event using one their templates and you can even upload your own photos. Then you add what you need. We use SignUpGenius for food, decorations, and even when we need to fill volunteer time slots. This tool has proven invaluable!

One of my favorite desserts was this Sopapilla Cheesecake that Melissa Polk had made. She gave me the recipe so I can share with you! It was the perfect addition to our Teacher Appreciation Lunch Ideas Mexican Fiesta!

What is the saying?…Happy wife, happy life. Happy teachers, happy students is the way I see it. This is one of the many ways we treat our teachers throughout the year. I hope you have enjoyed this Teacher Appreciation Lunch Ideas Mexican Fiesta! I have many more Teacher Appreciation Lunch Ideas coming soon. You may be interested in a Teacher Appreciation idea that is on a grand scale and last all week?! If so, you should check out this post on How To Show Teacher Appreciation In A Big Way! It’s loaded with ideas for the whole week.