As a home educating family, there are certain key elements to our weekly routine...one of my favourites is without doubt our weekly poetry tea time.
We introduced a poetry tea time into our weekly home ed routine about a year ago as a way to round off our week nicely on a Friday afternoon with a chilled activity which is enjoyable for everybody, but still educational.
We sit together as a family, enjoy some cakes and nibbles along with a nice warm drink (either hot chocolate or tea), and the children listen as I read aloud some poetry.
We've been using the Poem For Every Day Of The Year book for quite a while now, and it's wonderful as not only does it expose us all to lots of beautiful poetry ...some familiar and some less well known...but it also makes for some really interesting talking points and often sparks some wonderful and unexpected conversations.
As we have our afternoon teatimes on a Friday, I read all of the poems from the previous week at once ....as well being a wonderful opportunity to broaden our literary horizons, we also tend to learn a lot about other subjects from it too - for example in today's poems, we learnt about the first ever British Prime Minister, about Helen Keller and we read a really interesting poem which was featured in Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland...leading us to talk a lot about various aspects of British History as well as poetry!
These sort of "accidental" learning opportunities are some of my favorite moments of the children's home education journey and really do go to show that learning happens organically no matter what you're doing.
I realised this week that towards the end of April there is a National Tea Day, and so it seemed like the perfect time to make our Poetry Tea Times even more special by getting a nice new teapot - something I've been meaning to do for a while! I browsed online at various china teapots and came across a particularly lovely silver teapot too, but given that this is for a tea time with little ones I decided to go for something that I won't be too precious about - a nice Tinkerbell one from good old Asda! It does the job perfectly well and the children think it's really fancy anyway!
If you're looking for a way to celebrate National Tea Day, I highly recommend trying out a poetry tea time with your family - it can be as simple as making a little spread of cucumber sandwiches and cupcakes along with a nice pot of tea, and sharing some of your own favorite poems.
Its such a lovely chilled activity, and can really encourage children to get curious about poetry and even encourage them to create their own - you could even challenge the members of your family to write a poem each and share it during your afternoon tea.
National Tea Day is celebrated on 21st April, will you be celebrating with a nice afternoon tea with your family?