s/o bravewriter teatime

[athomeontheprairie]

every so often I see people comment about this. what do you do for a tea time? how is it a part of school and not just an afternoon snack?

assuming this is something more than a midafternoon snack, how has it benefited your children and your school?

[Farrar]

We do it once every couple of weeks.

 

We clean the table.  Put out nice things, a nice teapot or pitcher (we often do lemonade), a pretty plate, sometimes we put on a tablecloth.  I strew poetry books.  We swap them out at the library regularly and have a few that are ours.  I make some baked goods - muffins if we do it in the morning, cookies in the afternoon.  I usually also put out some fruit.

 

We sit down and take turns reading aloud.  Everyone must listen to the reader.  You get to pick your own poems to read.  We stop to discuss and reread some of them.

 

It's been good as an easy way to introduce poetry and discussion about poetry.  It's been good since my kids don't often read aloud to let them practice that skill.  It's been good for family time.  It's a nice thing to include dh if he's around.  If we have relatives in town while we're doing school, we usually do a poetry tea and include them, which is nice.  The grandparents all like it.

 

From the BW page about poetry teas:

http://www.bravewriter.com/bwl/poetry-teatimes/

[julie4]

We take turns getting the table ready, sometimes it's fancy tea cups, sometimes pretty paper stuff. Whose ever turn it is picks something, usually from outside as a center piece If it's me I try to pick a center piece that somewhat goes with my poetry selections. We take turns picking & reading poetry aloud. And since I like to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, we either do some poetry free writing or nature journal (if the center piece is something of interest from outdoors). Kids enjoy the poetry, setting the table and picking out the treat. We don't actually ever have tea, usually hot chocolate or lemonade. But my daughter loves the fancy tea cups.

[wallingjan]

We love tea time. We usually bake something in the morning. We bought fancy teacups just for this. Everyone takes turns reading aloud their choice of poems and the younger kids actually just make them up.

[Critterfixer]

We pick a tea treat every week, usually something small and sweet as I don't make a lot of desserts.

After lunch we brew our tea, have our treat and recite our poems. It is a nice transition between lunch and getting back to school. Sometimes I'll read a poem or two while we all munch.

We all like it.

[minuway]

We have a little kid tea set - it actually belongs to one of my girls, but she is always excited to share it - its like fiesta ware. We use juice usually instead of tea, but in our house this is quite a treat. There are cookies or some kind of baked good. We set it up like a tea party. Then the kids take turns reciting poems they either have newly memorized or have known for a while. Next they take turns picking poems to read from our poetry book - The Child's Anthology of Poetry - often finding old favorites, so then frequently I will take my turn to find some new ones. Its very informal. They really looks forward to it, to the point that they have insisted on doing it even when I've had a doctor's appointment on the normal afternoon, and their babysitter was there. She was very amused!

[An Unexpected Party]

I have been known to skip a poetry tea because we didn't have a clear surface on which I trusted the good plates.  Sometimes our poetry teas look like the three of us sitting under blankets under the couch with a couple of poetry books. Sometimes I get the kids' good china cups down. We keep a list of all the teas the kids have ever tried and rate them. My primary goal is to create a pleasant sensory experience around sharing the poetry collection we have in the house. We still need more time for the tradition to settle in so that the lessons about poetry can happen more naturally. I haven't been pushing that part because my nine year old would sniff that out before the sugar hit the bottom of his teacup and there would be rebellion.

[LAR]

We have teatime at least every other week.  We bake something special (or just pull something out of the freezer from a previous TeaTime Tuesday), get out the good china, and either read poetry, or play a geography game.  The one wall in our dining room is covered with an 8 ft x 12 ft world map, so I'll give each girl a laser pointer and call out the names of different countries.  It gets a little competitive for a quiet teatime activity, but it's always the way they want to end our hour together.

[jar7709]

We make a dedicated poetry time happen maybe once or twice a month, we'd like to do it more often, but you know...life. But we did it today!  For us, it's not actually tea, my kids find that too prissy.  We call it "poetry and ice cream" and have ice cream or popsicles or some other rare treat--I almost never bake it, I will admit the treat almost always something storebought. :o  We don't do anything special to the table, but if the weather is nice we like to take a blanket out and have our poetry time on the lawn.  Everyone picks a poetry book off our poetry shelf and we all take turns selecting poems to read aloud.  Sometimes we have a general theme, sometimes it's a free-for-all, but either way as we go I might gently point out rhyme or alliteration or how a certain line makes me feel, etc. It's been good for us.  Since we've been Bravewriter-y for a couple years now it has been so fun to watch my younger child go from a non-reader that would pick her poems (for me to read aloud) based on the illustrations on a page, to a reader that is starting to enjoy playing with language and selecting poems based on how fun they are to read aloud.  My older also did MCT poetry this year, and he enjoys spotting poetry principles he learned from that book "in the wild". 

[Critterfixer]

I tried to go to lemonade in the summer. The boys moaned. They like their afternoon cuppa, I guess.

[MelanieM]

We set the table with a pretty table cloth, our mis-matched special tea cups and saucers (picked up from a flea market a couple years ago), and a stack of poetry books. We have herbal tea and a snack while taking turns reading poems to each other, usually with classical music playing in the background. We also create some of our own poetry to share, or play word games to make up silly poems together while we chat. For example, yesterday the two oldest kids shared their diamonte poems they had written the day before. Then we spent some time with each person choosing a word for the rest of us to rhyme with, and we had to make up a silly sentence or poem using as many of the words as we could. It was super fun!

 

Yesterday we had friends over to have tea time with us, and we're thinking we'll try to make that a regular thing. We might end up throwing some art appreciation in there as well.

 

My kids love tea time, and would happily do it every day.

[chaya]

has anyone started doing this with older kids? I anticipate loads of eye rolling and resistance from my older boys (ages 13,10). I think my younger two will be all about it though (7 and 4).

I want to get off on the right foot, so I'm thinking of setting it up 'for the younger kids' and inviting the older ones to join if they feel like it (they hate to miss snacks so they probably will), with the only requirement being that they leave any negative comments (in english or body language) in their rooms.

 

[Walking-Iris]

I don't get to it every week. This winter we did a lot of hot chocolate. Sometimes it's lemonade, hot tea, even smoothies. Sometimes I bake a nice treat, sometimes it's snack food. A new thing I've been trying is a nice breakfast time. I'd like to add outside picnics this summer. Occasionally I involve my kids in the baking/ cooking (life skills like that are educational)

 

I don't get fancy with it. That's not quite our style. We just try to have fun.  And then we read aloud. That's supposed to be it in a nutshell. But I don't always get there.

 

I'm actually hoping to step up the teatime beyond how BW details it, because I feel that teatime, tea, fancy teapots and cups etc are a bit of Julie Bogart's personal style injected into the program. If tablecloths, teapots, and scones aren't necessarily your thing then trying to force it can be a bit silly. 

 

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I can get the benefit of a regular poetry study (which poetry is sometimes the literature most will slack learning I feel) and have the routine, and yet it be in our family's personal style. And the read alouds don't even have to be poetry.

 

I stopped for some time because my kids just started expecting a weekly treat and I didn't see much more than that. Tuesday became the day Mom baked.

 

I'm thinking about just dropping the Tuesday special-ness and trying to incorporate the reading aloud into our regular daily meals. But we read aloud daily anyway,so  I wasn't really seeing how adding a tea one day a week changed anything. Or maybe I could have more planned on the special day beyond the snacks and the reading aloud. Maybe follow up with a games day.

 

I don't know. It is the one aspect of the BWL that has been shaky for me to find my way into fully.

 

ETA: and someone tell me all about MCT poetry. 

 

 

 

 

[MelanieM]

has anyone started doing this with older kids? I anticipate loads of eye rolling and resistance from my older boys (ages 13,10). I think my younger two will be all about it though (7 and 4).

I want to get off on the right foot, so I'm thinking of setting it up 'for the younger kids' and inviting the older ones to join if they feel like it (they hate to miss snacks so they probably will), with the only requirement being that they leave any negative comments (in english or body language) in their rooms.

 

My kids are 11, 9, 5 and 2.5. They all enjoy it. I think snacks are a great draw. And maybe you could even make rules for participation... like you have to take a turn reading a poem, or say something you like about a poem that someone else is reading, if you want to enjoy the yummy snacks. ;) It also might be a good idea to find some poems about things that interest them, the goofier the better. I wouldn't worry too much about the quality of the poetry if I had a reluctant participant, and instead would focus on finding something that engaged them. My 9 yr old son's poem this week was about Minecraft, and my friend's kids wrote about Mario Cart and Donkey Kong characters. It was our guest's first poetry tea time (ages 8 and 10) and they were a bit reluctant at first, but I think everyone ultimately had fun. :)

[MelanieM]

I'm actually hoping to step up the teatime beyond how BW details it, because I feel that teatime, tea, fancy teapots and cups etc are a bit of Julie Bogart's personal style injected into the program. If tablecloths, teapots, and scones aren't necessarily your thing then trying to force it can be a bit silly. 

 

I stopped for some time because my kids just started expecting a weekly treat and I didn't see much more than that. Tuesday became the day Mom baked.

 

I'm thinking about just dropping the Tuesday special-ness and trying to incorporate the reading aloud into our regular daily meals. But we read aloud daily anyway,so  I wasn't really seeing how adding a tea one day a week changed anything. Or maybe I could have more planned on the special day beyond the snacks and the reading aloud. Maybe follow up with a games day.

 

I think the table cloth, fancy cups, etc. is part of what makes it stand out as special and different, and that's what makes it a fun time that's a little different than normal read aloud time, but you're right that there's no need for the fancy cups to be the special part if that isn't your thing. I think it's equally lovely if the kids come to see it as the special baking day! Turning it into a poetry study/game time sounds like a great idea. I love that! 

 

I also think there's something wonderful about having a regular rhythm to these things. We haven't been doing it every week, but I want to start making it more regular because I see how excited my kids get when they have that sense of "on X day we do this" in other areas.

[Farrar]

My kids aren't quite in the "older" category, but they'll be 10 yo before long and they show no signs of thinking poetry tea will ever be uncool.  How could baked good be uncool? ;)

[Farrar]

ETA: and someone tell me all about MCT poetry. 

 

We tried MCT Island and it turned out it was totally not for us...  Except for the poetry, which no one talks about, or, at least, people talk a lot less about.  I did not have the boys do most of the poetry writing assignments from the book - the various MCT style writing assignments were the thing that was most wrong for us MCT in general (where BW writing is like trying to find the path of least resistance to getting your own voice and words on paper, MCT writing is like trying to make your words play Twister while doing the Macarena and hula-hooping all at the same time - not exactly the path of least resistance).  However, I really loved the way that the book laid out all the poetry terms and introduced vocabulary in a gentle way.  And then, from there, we have taken that vocabulary and begun to use it during poetry tea times.

[jar7709]

Re: MCT Poetry

 

DS went through MCT Building Poems (and the rest of the Town level) this year.  DS is generally a good fit for MCT in general, but I did go all Bravewriter with it and modified the writing assignments, and I didn't have him do the poetry writing assignments at all unless he wanted to.  I do not care to make poetry a chore and if he's going to become a poet someday, I think it'll come about more organically through appreciation of poetry and skill with the written word in general.  So with that said, similar to Farrar, DS really enjoyed the way different poetry terminology is explained and the examples scattered throughout the Building Poems book.   It's not a heavy read, either, so I wouldn't be surprised if he picks it up again to refresh his knowledge in the future, as his interest in poetry continues to be sparked through the poetry teatimes.

[Walking-Iris]

Re: MCT Poetry

 

DS went through MCT Building Poems (and the rest of the Town level) this year.  DS is generally a good fit for MCT in general, but I did go all Bravewriter with it and modified the writing assignments, and I didn't have him do the poetry writing assignments at all unless he wanted to.  I do not care to make poetry a chore and if he's going to become a poet someday, I think it'll come about more organically through appreciation of poetry and skill with the written word in general.  So with that said, similar to Farrar, DS really enjoyed the way different poetry terminology is explained and the examples scattered throughout the Building Poems book.   It's not a heavy read, either, so I wouldn't be surprised if he picks it up again to refresh his knowledge in the future, as his interest in poetry continues to be sparked through the poetry teatimes.

So this poetry book is separate and usable without the rest of MCT? I've looked through the Island grammar resources in the past and I wasn't that impressed. 

[jar7709]

So this poetry book is separate and usable without the rest of MCT? I've looked through the Island grammar resources in the past and I wasn't that impressed. 

 

I don't know about the Island level poetry book because I haven't used it, but yes, Building Poems could be used independently of the rest of the MCT program, no problem.

[Critterfixer]

Mine will be eleven this fall, and no sign of disliking afternoon tea yet.

[Veritaserum]

We meet on Monday afternoons for a special treat (usually a baked good and lemonade or hot chocolate). We've done poetry, art history, black history, women's history--whatever I want to discuss with them that day. Lately I've just been reading aloud. We are working through The Lord of the Rings. We finished The Hobbit and are about a third of the way through Fellowship of the Ring.

[Alte Veste Academy]

We do tea time every day. It is my kids' favorite time of day. We mix it up a lot (poetry, short stories, sometimes a chapter book, but always some memory work, with each kid assigned a day for recitation). Sometimes we share something special from our nature notebooks or just talk about work we did that we are especially proud of. We sometimes continue our current events discussions from the morning, and we have been dabbling in elementary speech and debate skills.

 

I have a DS11, DD9, and DS8, and I don't see them tiring of it. Then again, we have been doing it from the start, so it has never felt awkward. The benefit of it, for us anyway, is a sense of leisure and calm. It is the last thing we do every afternoon and provides a wonderful transition between school and life.

 

By the way, it is not just a Brave Writer thing. I learned about it through Charlotte Mason books when I was first starting out and I think Circe and others recommend it too.

[Farrar]

So this poetry book is separate and usable without the rest of MCT? I've looked through the Island grammar resources in the past and I wasn't that impressed.

Yes. Totally independent. I don't think it connects that much to the other parts.

[minuway]

My kids are 9, 7.5, 6, and 4. The 7.5 and 9 year olds are the ringleaders for the poetry teatime though - it was one of those things that I tried once as a neat idea from reading about on the Bravewriter website and it just took off. We do it every. single. week. Its like snack time on crack. I bet they would do it every day - I will have to think about that.

 

We are on the Charlotte Mason inspired side of Classical, and to me  Bravewriter seems very much Charlotte Mason inspired, although I haven't read all of her material. 

 

I don't see any reason older kids wouldn't like doing this as well, as long as it was framed correctly.  I think the key is not to over- analyze the poetry and make it tiresome. Just reading / hearing it read  / reciting in a fun environment is enough. Who wouldn't like eating/drinking something fun while reading something new and interesting? I mean, at least as far as homeschoolers go?

[ChelC]

We're calling ours "Artsy Fartsy Hour" which is apparently a more palatable name for boys than Tea Time. My boys are 11 and 8 and they love it. We have a treat, recite poetry, and learn about either an artist or a composer and some of their works (we follow each artist or composer for about 3 weeks).

[Momof3littles]

Yes, the MCT poetry can be used alone, but the other components do reinforce one another when used together.  We love it, but I agree the poetry writing can be intense for a kid who isn't passionate about wanting to write. 

 

I love Trader Joe's for tea time things like scones.  Super easy to break out of the package and pop in the oven like a loving mom :)

[minuway]

We also time ours to coincide with the afternoon after the Trader Joe's run.... so easy to grab a tub of cookies or scones or something. I would love to bake everything, but if I tried to line everything up like that we would never do it!