21st April Tea Day

”You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
~ C.S. Lewis

There is nothing nicer than a good read and a cup of tea. So celebrating Tea Day is a must. Tea is not something children give a lot of thought to, because very few of them actually drink tea, but so many children's picture books feature tea. At the very minimum they finish with and 'they all had tea'...it is a warm, secure, happy, family feeling to finish with. Think of The Elephant and the Bad Baby at the end where everyone goes back to the baby's home and his mother gives them tea and pancakes. Think of Alfie Gets in First and how after the problem of the locked door is finally solved everybody sits down for a cup of tea. Yes, these books are old but the pattern continues and now there are even stories with tea in the title.

Many years ago when I started teaching I did a lengthy integrated social science unit called 'What's in a cup of tea?' and my Year 5 class and I explored the tea industry, the sugar industry and the milk industry for a whole term. What fun it was and given my knowledge now of children's literature I would have had plenty of good books to add to it. What a shame the current curriculum doesn't allow for such tangents or flights of fancy anymore.

Below are covers of books in our library that feature tea parties, cups of tea or the importance of tea. The Biography of Tea pictured above gives a comprehensive history of tea and its role in many cultures.

16th August Beatrice Schenk de Regniers (1914 - 2000) Marchette Chute (1909 - 1994) Eileen Spinelli (1942)

This is the birthday of poets! Each of these three women has written poetry that school children should remember, recite and revisit. I wrote about Beatrice Schenk de Regniers last year here.

Marchette Chute is an American author who is well known as the author of biographies about other writers such as Shakespeare, Chaucer and Ben Jonson. While these are for older audiences, she is also a children's poet. Her verses are usually short ideal for handwriting practice, vocabulary discussion and teaching rhyme with very young children.

See examples such as these:

My Family

Part of my family is grown up tall.

Part of my family is little and small.

I'm in the middle and pleased with them all.

Showers

Squelch and squirt and squiggle,

Drizzle and drip and drain-

Such a lot of water

Comes down with the rain!

The third poet, also American, is Eileen Spinelli. She is responsible for many collections of poems published in picture book format. Her website has a section entitled 'Poem of the Month' so that each time you visit you will find something new. I love her collection of poems, Tea Party Today: Poems to Sip and Savour as I have a collection of teapots and love to make a cup of tea and read. The children at school love Sophie's Masterpiece, a story about a spider who is devoted to her webmaking craft and The Best Story, a book to help when discussing writing and what to put in a story, but she is probably best known for her story, Somebody Loves You, Mr Hatch about a community working together to make someone feel valued.