days of happiness, day 5

I love drinking tea in the afternoon or early evening. It's relaxing and a welcome ritual. I love it so much that sometimes I serve (herbal) tea to my students. Today I was musing on the most recent time. In December, our class finished writing individual How To books and we had a writing celebration at the end. We all sat in a circle and everyone read aloud a small excerpt that was their favorite part, then we raised our cups of tea and gave a toast, "To writing!" then we had a reception. During the reception, children walked around sharing their books with each other and asking each other questions and drinking tea. Many of them found that the tea was not to their liking (I told them that was okay, not everything will be), but everyone tried it. It was truly amazing to watch how seriously they took our reception -- not serious as in stoic, but serious in terms of talking to each other, trying the tea, and being genuinely excited about our writing.

Our Poetry writing focus is winding down -- I can't wait to have our writing celebration for that!




This is (nearly) every class picture from my years of teaching. Earlier this year I thought that I might have misplaced some of them, but today I discovered that I have every one. It's exciting to have so many, and to remember such vivid things about each class when I look them over.

I would love to hang them all up, but I'm not sure the best way to do so. Any suggestions?

tea@writing...

I'm sitting in the classroom right now, sipping a cup of tea on a (very) rainy morning. Right away, I was reminded of last Friday morning. We had tea during writing time in the classroom. I'm surprised it's taken me so long.

Before writing, my class got talking about something (I wish I could remember) and I looked at them all and in a joking manner said, "But, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a coffee shop." A few of them giggled.

"Yes, it is," one of them said.

"It is not," I said, shaking my head. "Look around you. Do you see tables and things?" [NOTE TO FUTURE SELF: bad idea...]

They looked around and started laughing. "Yes, right there!" they said, pointing to the tables in our classroom.

I laughed. "Okay, well, yes, there are tables and chairs and people, but there's no big coffee machine nor anyone here to take orders..."

Alejandro then pointed to the fifteen year old, 4-cup coffee maker that I have on the shelf behind my desk and said, "Isn't that a coffee maker?"

Okay. I know when I've been bested.

So, we started our Writing Workshop and I thought, "Why not have a little cafe for the day?" I heated up the water in my coffee maker, threw in about four bags of Cardamom Cinnamon tea (herbal, no caffeine), sprinkled in about 1/3 of a pack of sugar, then took orders. After it cooled, I delivered small cups of sweet-smelling tea to all of the students that wanted some (all but one). Some of them loved it, some of them found that it was not to their liking, but we all sat and inhaled and drank and wrote for the rest of Writing Workshop.

One teacher even walked in during that time to borrow a couple of my students and commented on how lovely it smelled in our room.

The kids were tickled by the whole thing.

Sounds like we ought to do something like this a bit more often. Maybe you'd like to join us?