Friday Tea Time in our Home......

As part of our new routine this year we are having a family (with those at home) 'Teatime Get together ' after lunch on Fridays.

This is something we used to do when our older ones were littler on a Sunday afternoon, the tea time part  and on a Saturday evening the children would put on a little concert exhibiting from their learning for the week. This was inspired by our using Charlotte Mason as the back bone in the education of our children then, as well as now but with some tweaks of other philosophies thrown in to the party to suit our current students and family lifestyle.

When I was planning for the new year this was something I wanted to put back in our lives.
It is very simple really but with lots of children it can be a more complicated event to put  together which is probably one of the reasons why it fell out of fashion

Anyway we decided we would have tea time with our special tea cups set out each Friday afternoon with a sampling of goodies to devour.......but only after presenting the necessary admission price required.

Hence the admission price is the presentation of some particular academic achievements that have been worked on during the week.

These are neither large requests or highly academic really but a sampling of some of the work the children have done with a little bit of fun thrown in as well.

First off is the recitation of the poem the children have been learning.
The younger ones have been learning - The Swing by RL Stevenson
Vellvin and Rogan learnt The Merry Inn Song from Lord of the Rings in 4 days which I was quite impressed with.

 
Then the children put on a skit with 15 mins to prepare for. The ideas will be random and this week we started off simple with a standard favourite to guide them- Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Once we have the Teatime actually ready, this week we only had store bought cookies as I had to pick Eden and Saxon up from work and it was only our first week so we were still getting used to the time frame we are now working with we then move on to a Spelling Bee.

The Spelling Bee, which is very popular in our home is taken from some lists that some of the children have and then just random words from a book or dictionary etc.

I then test the Vellvin and Rogan using the Geography cards they have made up themselves and practiced through the week and some times tables for the little ones.

After this we have two projects that we will be working on during the year.
The first is a weekly craft project together and the second is working on the monthly newspaper the children will be putting together for our family.

In honesty we only got part way through the craft project this week and did not start the newspaper.

Again it was due to the ironing out the time frames and picking up older working children and other arrangements that we are still working through.

However the whole afternoon was greatly anticipated all week and I can really see this as a culmination of learning achievements to share with each other.

So a summary of the afternoons activities-
Recitation of poems and Scripture verses
Spelling Bee
A short skit worked out and presented
Craft project together
Work on the monthly family newspaper
History and Geography oral testing for Vellvin and Rogan
Times tables for littlies
Eating of the goodies and drinking of tea from our very pretty china tea cups and cake plates
Packing up and washing up for me as the children work on the aforementioned newspaper

If we have time I may add a little impromptu Art Appreciation and we do have some classical music playing in the background for Music Appreciation.

Thank you for visiting us for this week and our 'Tea Time Tradition'

Blessings to you and your homes,