On today’s podcast I am joined by homeschool mom Jennifer Stowe who has turned a passion for all things tea into a business and educational experience for her entire family. Join us as we talk about the historical, cultural, and literary learning we can derive from tea, fun food ideas for tea time, and how to expand upon passions to enhance learning.
Pam: This is Your Morning Basket where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 87 of the, your morning basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I am so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, today the episode of the podcast is about something that you can do in your morning basket, if you so desire, but you can also do it at other times of the day, but it is one of my favorite homeschooling traditions. And it’s all about tea time. Now this particular episode of the podcast, we have an expert on tea. Yes, actually tea. Her name is Jennifer Stowe, and she’s coming on to tell us all about how we can use real tea as kind of a central idea for learning in our home. And I kind of emphasize that because a lot of time when we’ve done tea time at my house, you know, there was hot chocolate or lemonade in the cups, but Jennifer is all about tea. [spp-transcript]
Jennifer: You can take just about any culture in the world and they themselves have some connection to tea, and that’s not just China. You can look at Japan, you can look at the middle East. You can look at Africa, all of Europe, and even this country, we all have some connection to tea.
She actually owns her own tea room with her homeschool daughters. They have built all of these educational experiences and opportunities around tea. Really fascinating. Now I want to tell you that during the podcast, I learned so much when I was recording this one guys, but during the podcast, Jennifer talks about all the different foods that you can eat during your tea time. And it’s really going to vary, not surprisingly based on the culture that you’re emulating. So if you’re doing a Chinese tea or a Japanese tea or an African tea, the food is going to be very different than it would be at an English tea, which is what we often think of when it comes to tea time food. So I want you to listen for that. Having said that in the United States, in the 21st century, having a tea time with our kids, we are often as moms looking for some quick and easy food, some snacks that we can make with things that we probably already have in our pantry.
So as a companion to this particular podcast, I have put together for you, a collection of five easy recipes that you can make for your tea time, something a little bit special with the foods that you already have in your pantry, along with a pantry planning sheet. So the pantry planning sheet is all about you writing down a record of what your kids really enjoy eating during tea time,
some different things you might need to have on hand and what your kids enjoy drinking during tea time as well, just in case they’re not buying in to the idea of tea. So to get that download, come on over to Pambarnhill.com/teatime, all one word, and you can get it there. We would love to share that one with you. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of the podcast.
Author. Jennifer Stowe is a registered nurse, master herbalist tea educator, and homeschool mom of six. She is a nationally recognized speaker whose topics include all aspect of tea and herbs, etiquette and fine arts. Jennifer is the author of six books, including Infused: Tea Time in Fine Arts. And Wee Bites and Nibbles: Manners and Menus for the Tiniest Tea Drinkers, her books, weave tea together with poetry, literature, foreign cultures, and fine art. Along with her daughters, Jennifer owns and operates three sisters tea room in Campbellsville, Tennessee, where she hosts frequent educational teas designed, especially for children. Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Pam. It’s good to be here.
It is. So, so much fun to have you here. This was a topic where I was like, wow, that sounds really cool. Like that would be something that would be a lot of fun to explore, especially during the cold winter months. It’s just some of the different things behind tea. A lot of homeschoolers love to have tea parties, but I don’t know if we’ve ever thought about it quite as much as you have.
I’ve thought a lot about tea through the years. That’s for sure.
Well, tell me a little bit about you and about your homeschooling
I’d be happy to, I’ve been married for 30 years to a military man who retired 10 years ago. And when that happened, we really left sort of corporate America. And we moved out to the country and the Hills of Tennessee and I had six children still in my homeschool at that time.
And we just jumped into farm life with gusto. So, but today, 10 years later, I now just have three children still that I’m schooling. And because I was able to find a little bit of free time, I started to pursue some personal interests, which I soon found out were also interests of my daughters. And that’s how our little tea room developed.
But as far as our homeschool goes, we’ve always kind of embraced a Charlotte Mason/classical style, which may seem a little strange, but that is very much the approach we had. We always worked off of a timeline, but we always used the beautiful, the good and the beautiful in life, whether that was nature, poetry,art music was a huge part of our daily homeschool routine. And I currently have primarily high schoolers left. I have three children who have graduated two that are still in college and one pursuing a bachelor’s and the other, her master’s. So we’re definitely on the tail end of homeschooling. It’s been, it’s been 23 years so far, and I think maybe I have another five or six to go.
Well, that is awesome. And I love the fact that you are forward thinking and I’ve started thinking about, well, what am I going to do as these children grow up and leave and you’ve looked into, well, actually you haven’t just looked into it. You’ve started kind of your next phase by, by working on your tea room. So tell me what,
what is, what’s a tea room? How is that different than a restaurant?
Good question. A tea room is just open for certain hours typically, and it only serves a particular type of menu. And that would be a tea menu where you might have a three tiered tray and certain items on each tier and pots of tea. And probably not a lot else.
Now, a lot of different types of restaurants are called tea rooms and that’s perfectly fine. We probably run a more traditional British afternoon tea style tea room. So we just have one tea event a week because I still have a lot of responsibilities with school and now on the farm, but we serve a special menu every month when we have our afternoon tea.
And then the other tea events tend to be children’s book clubs. We have a tea education class once a month, and we also have a, what we call a craft tea where we do a guided craft and have an afternoon tea as well. So we typically don’t have drop-ins. Everything is by reservation and we have a pre planned menu.
Nobody really gets to order anything except for their choice of tea.
Oh, fun.
Okay. I’m thinking I need a tea room in my town. That sounds like so much fun, but since I’m not in Tennessee, we’re going to talk a little bit more about how we can bring some of this stuff into our homes. But before we do, what sparked your interest in tea? What led to you becoming a tea educator?
I really don’t remember When I developed an interest in tea, I’ve always been a consumer of tea and therefore, as I got older and I started really teaching the children, I saw a thread of tea in history and it just got me interested in and we read a little bit more and I saw tea and other parts of the world.
And so I began to purposely read books about tea history and its inception and, and then eventually different cultures and how they use tea in their daily life. So it was a real gradual interest and grew quite naturally, but it about five or six years ago, I very purposely started to engage in some education and pursued some tea classes and some tea tastings and, and, you know, really learned the art and craft of tea. So I could then turn around and share that with the other people in our tea room.
Oh, that’s awesome. So let’s kind of dive into some of what you were talking about with history. You have actually use tea and you still use kind of this idea of tea and you wrap it up with all kinds of learning, literature, culture, and even history. So what does that look like in a homeschool?
Well, it’s, it’s in my mind, such a perfect way to educate your children. You can take just about any culture in the world and they themselves have some connection to tea, and that’s not just China. You can look at Japan, you can look at the middle East, you can look at Africa, all of Europe and even this country, we all have some connection to tea and then you look and see what sort of historical events happened around tea in any particular country. And for example, we’ll just take our country and we have the Boston tea party. Well, now we have a thread that we can tie together with an entire unit study on the civil, sorry, on the revolutionary war. And now it’s starting to get exciting because we can enjoy our Liberty tea during our morning study time reading about the Boston tea party. And we now have a personal connection, or we can contact a tea company in great Britain and actually get a sample of the type of tea that was thrown overboard by the Sons of Liberty and enjoy a cup of that while we’re reading about it.
So it makes learning alive. It makes learning very, very real to the, to the child. And in my mind, a very delicious too. I had never thought that I like Just the idea of contacting a company and trying to find a sample of that tea drinking tea, you know, while you’re studying that particular thread of history, it really does make a connection for the kids that I hadn’t considered.
Yes, it does. And you can take that a step further. If you want to study Japan, you don’t even need to go too deep into Japanese culture before you learn the whole way of tea, the Chado. And we start to see what their culture is like, their sense of appreciation for beauty, for precision, for diligence and character, it’s all wrapped up in their tea ceremony.
So their religion is too, but we can take the beautiful part of that and, and learn from it. We can also find some matcha tea and try the tea that they’re drinking and learn why their tea is so different than tea and other countries. So there’s tremendous learning potential. That’s wrapped up in this tiny little leaf
That almost gets into like, you know, certainly we’ve touched on history and geography, but almost like a science, like a horticulture lesson when it comes to, why is this tea different from that?
Oh, yes. That’s an entire area of study when it comes to tea and just how all the, all the different teas that we see on the shelf in a supermarket come from one single leaf.
And it’s all the processing that makes a type of team one way or another. So a green and a black tea com are the same exactly to start with. It’s simply the processing that they undergo, which creates the type of tea it becomes. So there’s a huge potential for not only botany, but also just the science behind why a tea stays green or why it turns black, you know, oxidation and heat and, and firing and drawing and rolling. And it just doesn’t stop.
Okay. That’s fascinating. Cause I thought it was different kinds of tea leaves, but no, it’s not. So that’s really neat. Okay. Learn something new today. What about the literature connection? So you’re, you’re making these fabulous, like cultural and historical connections. What, what literature connections can we make with tea?
Well, if you are a lover of Jane Austin, it’s an easy thing to, to see. Although in Jane Austen’s time, they had a very simplified affection for tea it was pretty much just the drink, nothing like an elaborate, a tea meal that we see in Victorian and Edwardian times in England, and even coming into this country at the turn of the 20th century, but through all throughout literature, our beautiful extracts of writing, describing tea scenes. So now we can read these extracts and we can memorize beautiful phrases and paragraphs, even of Victorian authors who wrote about the, the beauty of spending an hour with quiet contemplation or with company and sandwiches or the humor of Oscar Wilde writing in The Importance of Being Earnest. My children have acted that scene out there, hilarious tea party. We have so much that we can use to teach the children fine writing memory, work, recitation, and even acting.
Oh, I love it. I love it. Okay. So obviously I have underestimated the importance of tea everywhere and a great unifying factor. I mean, my daughter absolutely loves tea and it never occurred to me to bring this in as kind of a hook for her, you know, across learning. I use so many different things as hooks for my kids in their learning. And tea was something that had really never occurred to me. But now you’ve got my wheels turning just a little bit. So how can families implement, I guess, team like a themed tea in their home or in their morning basket as a way of learning?
Do you have any ideas? Yes, I do have a great idea. We put out a book called We Bites and Nibbles and it takes seven very popular children’s picture books Ping, for example, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, The Empty Pot, very common books that might even be on your shelf right now. And we created an entire tea event around these picture books provided menus and crafts and questions and activities for the children to do so that would be in my mind, a really fun way to get children involved in the tea experience very quickly, very easily, but that’s definitely more of an event you would have to do a little pre-planning, maybe invite some friends over, so that wouldn’t be an every day sort of thing, but that is a wonderful way to implement for a special occasion or, you know, maybe the end of a busy semester or something like that in school.
But I really believe the best way a family can implement tea and into their morning time would be simply to take one of the art books that we’ve done. One of them is called Infused; it’s tea time and fine art. And the other is called Hide and Seek. And it’s a, it’s a children’s I spy for fine arts. And this is so usable at any moment in time, you simply open the book and a beautiful replica of a piece of fine art is on display for the children to just simply gaze that. And as I look at it, they become interested in the colors or the subject matter. And you can just ask them a few simple guided questions and begin a dialogue about the painting, but on the opposing page for the mom is a little bit of information about the artists background, what country that he’s from, maybe his time in history. So you can feed the children a little more information and have a very impromptu picture study without any need for prep work or, or thinking ahead. And the pictures are all very engaging for children because they feature children themselves in infused every picture has tea and represented in some way, but it also has children enjoying the tea and our Hide and Seek my daughters actually put that book together and they have put in questions for the children to think about as they’re looking at the picture and all of those pictures themselves have feature children doing interesting things.
So that’s just a couple of ways I didn’t mean to go on quite that long, but you can do it almost instantaneously. The other book that we have is afternoon tea and that’s rhymes for children. And these are a 19th century poems that are all about children and they’re doing everyday sorts of things and they have beautiful time period illustrations, but they’re, they look quite different than children today.
And they are a wonderful lesson of what colonial America looks like. So that’s the second book that I thought would be very, very simple for parents to pick up without any prep work, open the book, read a poem and chat with the children about why a little girl would be mopping a floor or, or shoeing ducks down a path, or doing some of these unusual things that we might expect in colonial times, but maybe not so much today. Right. Right. And then you said in Infused that the book there were depictions of tea in the artwork that you use in the book. That’s correct. All of the pictures, feature children, enjoying tea in some way, whether that’s in this country or in Europe or in Asia. Oh, interesting. Okay. That’s so interesting.
So what if you have children who are not familiar with tea, how do you get, how do you get them started in kind of this idea of, you know, bringing them to the table and getting them interested in trying some tea?
Well, I’m not a stickler that it has to be the brewed liquid of the Camillia sinensis plant. I’m perfectly happy to serve herbals or tisanes or even hot chocolate. If that’s what the children prefer. I find that eventually all kids want to come around and try the, the actual tea. But sometimes to start, we just have a little bit of cinnamon milk for the young ones or a peppermint tea or rooibos, but it’s not so much what’s in the cup to that. Whatever will bring the children round and have that spirit receptive spirit to be United with their siblings and learn is good, is good for me.
I love that. I love, love, love that because yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times families want the community of coming together and making it a little bit special. You know, we always talk about coming together daily or almost daily and morning time. But I think adding something like the tea just kind of gives it a little bit of extra specialness to the day and set time apart.
We definitely agree with that. In fact, Tuesdays are the day we have a proper tea time in my house. And so today is Tuesday and my 16 year old son has already asked me to have tea with him this afternoon, because it is a time that is set apart and separate. Now this isn’t exactly what we do for break for morning time.
This is set apart in different and we make scones and have pots of tea, just two of us family members together. And we usually read or together or play a game together. But every morning we start off round the table with the teapot and our books to kind of just start our day off on the right foot first, you know, with it, with the devotion and then some, some memory work and some reading out loud and then something beautiful, whether it’s a piece of fine art or a piece of music, we do a lot of composer studies or a poem if I didn’t already say that. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what if I have boys? Cause you mentioned that your son had actually had
to ask you to do tea with him.
I think a lot of times we get this idea that Victorian tea is just for girls. So what could be some of the benefits of actually slowing down and connecting and doing, you know, serving tea and maybe some of these more special tea snacks, which we’re going to talk about in a minute with our boys and not just our girls?
Well, I love this question because tea is not for girls and only it’s for everybody. When I look at some of the finest tea masters throughout the ages, hands down, they’re all men. And I can tell you, they weren’t drinking out of China tea cups with little pink roses on them. They were drinking out of beautiful hand pottery, which my, my two sons are very interested in pursuing right now.
So there’s another extension of tea in, in your, their education. They want to make these matcha bowls out of clay. But anyways, I have found a couple of things work very well. First of all, I have found stainless steel tea cups for my boys. So nothing froo froo there. I do want them to drink out of tea cups simply because part of the tea experiences also manners and etiquette.
And when you’re slogging a tea out of a great big mug, you aren’t really working on your manners or being aware of your matters very much. But if I give you a tea cup, everything about your persona will change just a little bit. And, but my boys don’t want anything fussy. So I found these great stainless steel tea cups, and we, we use those all the time. That’s their tea cup. Now my girls have oodles of China with pink roses, but the boys, that’s what they have. So that makes them feel a little bit more comfortable right off the bat. We also do a lot of Asian style tea where they drink out of more something that looks a little bit more like a bowl, a small bowl, like maybe a dipping sauce type bowl than an actual tea cup. So that helps us also. But the bottom line is if there’s food involved, I have found that boys typically show up. So I have used that to our advantage and I have, and they’re great bakers. They, they want to get it on the act and bake the cake or the scones or the cookies that they like best for tea.
So they’re motivated by their taste buds, as well as knowing that they have been, that I’ve selected something special just for them in, in this stainless steel cup. It’s just been two things that have worked really well for us is food and something that’s not quite so feminine to drink out of.
Oh, I love that. I had never even heard of stainless. I’m like sitting over here, looking it up on Amazon as you’re talking about it. I never heard of those. So that’s, that’s absolutely perfect because then you eliminate the, the little flowery cups. We have some of those and gives the boys something else to drink out of. I wanted to talk to you about food. What are, and you’ve mentioned a couple of different kinds, but what are some different kinds of tea foods? And do you ever do savory tea foods?
Okay, well, this is such an exciting question because again, the possibility and potential for learning is, is just amazing. If we think of tea food, we think of in Edwardian tea times tend to have a savory crustless sandwich. So it’s a little tiny sliver of a cucumber sandwich or a chicken salad or something like that.
And then you have your scones and then you have your sweets and they could be anything from chocolate mousse to a little shortbread cookie, to a slice of cake. Anything goes there, but that’s just the English version of tea. If we wanted to branch out and do tea, the way Moroccans do in North Africa, we would have stuffed dates and we would have oranges and almonds with our team.
If we were over in China, we would probably have what, some type of a hard-boiled egg, maybe a quail egg, or a small poultry egg. We would have something that was very savory, like crispy noodles or hot and spicy, like a green, something that looks similar to a green bean or some kind of steamed green vegetable, asparagus, something like that, which would have a very, very hot sauce on top of it. If we were in Japan, we would definitely have something that had seaweed or fish based food. So again, the learning potential is there to follow your country of study, or just to say, Hey, let’s, let’s try some foods from a that they would typically eat in Turkey with their tea, which is another fascinating study. All in its own. The middle East has its own sort of traditions that are beautiful. So lots of different versions, but typically in America, we think pretty much something sweet to go with a cup of tea. And that’s great. We’ll make a bunt cake or we’ll make chocolate chip cookies any day. It might be something out of, but it definitely a baked good, like at a, you know, sweet baked.
Good. Oh, I love that. And yeah, I just, I think the thing that’s always going through my mind is yes, there’s English tea, or sure. There might be cha you know, tea, you know, kind of a Chinese or a Japanese setting for tea, but I never think about the middle East or some of these other areas. And there’s so much learning, you know, and even early American tea that could be done when you really start to look at all of this around the world and through history as well.
So, yeah. Yeah. So What made you guys decide that you wanted to start a tea room and how are your, how are your daughters involved in this?
Well, as I had mentioned earlier, when my children started to graduate, I started looking ahead to when maybe I wouldn’t have children in school and what was I going to do then? And I thought, well, maybe I could share my passion for tea with other people. And I toyed around with the idea of a tea room, but it was many, many years before we actually got it to a physical tea room on our property. We began by carrying teas all over the place. We would take them to homeschool groups and church, ladies groups at churches, nursing homes, even libraries, public schools. And we would teach a program called tea around the world. And we would do much of what I’ve just discussed here, as far as sharing tea in different cultures. And we had samples of all the different teas. And at times we even had costumes from the different countries and what traditional tea, where might a clothing, where it might look like. And we also just took teas for parties if people wanted to have an individual, a personal party in their home. And so we were kind of like a traveling tea room for awhile.
And then my husband built a little cottage on our property, and I kept looking at it during construction time thinking what a great tea room it would make and he was kind enough to allow me to do that. And so we opened that team room six years ago on our property. And it’s something that I could never, never do without my daughters. And I realized that they are growing up and graduating, and we may not have this tea room forever. They are such an integral part of the functioning of the tea room. My, eldest daughter is 25. She’s of getting her master’s in philology and she’s a graphic designer. She’s extremely artistic. And so she’s the one that does all of our books and she does beautiful place cards for the table. She decorates the tea room with such flair and, and I’d be lost without that. So my second daughter is almost 19 and she is my office manager. She does all of the computer work and the organization of, of the reservations and things that are very, very tedious for me. She does with great skill.
And then my youngest daughter, she’s 12. And she, since she was only six when we started this, so she has been our greeter since day one. And since a lot of our members are a lot of our guests to our regular teas, tend to be seniors being greeted by a six year old and getting hugs. And, and a lot of attention has, has just kind of warmed their hearts. And she’s grown out very, very comfortable with people through different age groups and with different, you know, some of them come in with pains or, you know, she just doesn’t have any problem with the, eh, any, any people of any kind. So that’s always been a real, real blessing to have her stand out there and greet people so enthusiastically, and as she’s grown up, she’s continued to be quite the social butterfly. So that’s, that’s been a blessing, but as you can see, I just sort of make the food and show up, but we always have a program with every, every event that we host. So sometimes we might feature an artist. We just had a, a tea on Clint’s golden period. And before that, we did Vincent van Gogh and we’ve featured poets, all kinds of things. Oh, we did a Votes for Women tea this summer to commemorate the hundredth anniversary. So there’s always something that’s maybe a tiny bit educational that we offer to our guests and kind of tie that theme throughout the food throughout the decor and their place cards. So that in addition to getting cups of tea, they’re also maybe getting a little tidbit they didn’t know too much about before they walked through our doors.
I love it. I love it because so first of all, you’ve, you’ve totally made this a family affair for a homeschooling family and look at all the wonderful, valuable skills that your, your daughters especially have picked up by working in the tea room. And then you’ve kind of taken some of the beauty of the lifestyle of homeschooling and the things we do at homeschoolers and taking it out and shared it with the community at large. And I think that’s just so much fun.
Yes, that really was our vision to start with is, is to share, to share a love of whatever we were studying with other people. And now people have really come to, okay, so what are we going to learn today? Or what are we talking about today? And, you know, we might even just study, we had a tea recently where we just read Edgar Guest poetry, because we were just enamored with his poetry. We found an old book and started reading it around the table and shared that with our guests. So it doesn’t take much to make a tea for us.
Oh, I love it. Okay. So if we have a mom who’s listening and she’s like, you know what, this sounds like so much fun. What does a mom need to do to get started easily with using tea as a tool for learning in their homeschool?
I would say just to just a couple of things, I would go to the grocery store and pick up a few varieties of tea that sound appealing to you, and then maybe even pop into a thrift store of some kind and pick up a few odds and ends, or maybe, maybe just ask your mother-in-law or your grandmother or something like that if they have any tea cups, because I really do think having something that’s just a little set apart. It’s not what you use every morning for breakfast. This is our tea time material is important. Then I would pick out a couple of poetry books and for children, I have some real favorites.
I love Robert Louis Stevenson for children. And I’ve already mentioned Edgar Guest. I love Robert Frost. There’s, there’s no end to the choices for poetry books, but find something that’s geared to children and make yourself a cup of tea with those tea bags in the pretty tea and begin reading poetry to your children, or collect note cards that people send you, or that you might see on a stationery shelf of fine art, collect them, start showing them to your children or go to the library and pick out there’s some wonderful children’s books on art today in the I spy vein that are very easily accessible and, and really easy to use and begin the practice of feasting on the good and the beautiful things in life.
And, you know, the, the culture at large wants to show us something other than these beautiful pictures, it’s up to us as moms to, to really infuse into the hearts of our kids, the beauty and not the ugliness that man can create.
Oh, I love it. I love it. So just very simply collect ups, some tea, get those set apart items. I love that idea and then, and find some beautiful things to share, which is kind of what we do with morning time. So just add something Exactly, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Jennifer, Is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know about, about tea?
Well, let’s see. I don’t know. I would like to tell you that tea is delicious, but also if you would like to delve into its health properties, that’s another entire area of study that you could pursue because tea is the makes claims to have tremendous immune boosting properties, health benefits for the heart and blood pressure. So overall, I want to say that tea is a very good thing.
Oh, it sounds like it. Yeah. So once again, you’ve thrown out a whole new area of study for us when it comes down. Like, I didn’t even think about that. So it’s amazing how something so simple as tea and, you know, being from the South, we’ve mostly done sweet tea, which is an ice, but it’s amazing to think about just the depths that you can plumb when it comes to something so simple as tea.
So I really appreciate you coming on today and like leading us into this whole new area of knowledge and how we might, could use it in our homeschools. So where can people find you online?
We have a website, threesisterstearoom.com. We have a Facebook page by the same name and all of our books are available on Amazon. And I have an author’s page as Jennifer Stowe, even though my daughters have done some of the books, we just put them all under one name.
Awesome. Awesome. And it’s threesisterstearoom.com. And we will link to that one in the show notes. It’s a delightful website with lots of great information there as well. So we’ll connect everybody up with that. Well, Jennifer, thanks so much for coming on
Thank you so much for inviting me. It was lovely.
And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to Jennifer’s website and to all of her wonderful tee time books and resources that she told us about today, they sound so much fun. You can find them on the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Those are pambarnhill.com/YMB87.
Now also on the show notes, you can find a link to our five easy recipes and tea time pantry planner that we have absolutely free for you. So come and download that blend as well. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we have something a little bit different on the podcast. We are sharing with you. One of the trainings for moms that is inside the,
your morning basket plus membership. Now this training is all about how in the world can I do morning time with a wide range of ages and with toddlers and little ones under foot at the same time. So we have mom of 10, Heather Tully who did this training with me a couple years ago. We’re pulling out the audio. We’re actually even going to provide the video to you as well.
If you want to come over to the website and watch it, and you’re going to learn all about how you can get this done. It’s one of the biggest questions that we have about doing morning time in the homeschool. And I think it’s going to be incredibly helpful. So be back in a couple of weeks for that one and until then keep seeking truth, goodness and beauty in your homeschool day.
Links and Resources from Today’s Show
- Three Sisters Tearoom Website
- Three Sisters Tearoom on Facebook
- Infused: Tea Time in Fine Art
- Wee Bites and Nibbles: Manners and Menus for the Tiniest Tea Drinkers
- The Hide and Seek Gallery: A Child’s I Spy in Fine Art
- Afternoon Tea: Rhymes for Children
- The Importance of Being Earnest
- The Story about Ping
- Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse
- The Empty Pot
- It’s Tea Time!
- Easy Tips for Poetry Tea Parties
- Poetry Teatime for the Multi-Age Family
- Host Your Own Kids’ Poetry Tea
- Host a Fall Poetry Tea
- About Robert Louis Stevenson
- About Edgar Guest
- About Robert Frost
Infused: Tea Time in Fine ArtWee Bites and Nibbles: Manners and Menus for the Tiniest Tea DrinkersThe Hide and Seek Gallery: A Child’s I Spy in Fine ArtAfternoon Tea: Rhymes for ChildrenThe Importance of Being EarnestThe Story about PingLilly’s Purple Plastic PurseThe Empty Pot
Key Ideas about Tea Time in Morning Time
Many countries worldwide have deep connections with tea. So, having tea time in your homeschool doesn’t just provide a cozy environment for learning but is also a great opportunity to dive into a cultural experience as well. Studying tea can lead you into a variety of subjects including geography, botany, horticulture, literature, history and so much more.
Tea time provides an opportunity for connection as a family where they can come together and learn as a group. It can be an opportunity for everyone to practice their manners and etiquette while learning about things that are good, true, and beautiful.
Doing a tea is as simple as picking up a few varieties of tea, getting a couple of nice teacups, and gathering some poetry or art books geared toward children and enjoying them together as a family.
Find What you Want to Hear
- [3:36] meet Jennifer Stowe
- [7:00] what a tea room is all about
- [8:46] how Jennifer became interested in a tea education
- [9:59] using tea to learn history, geography, and culture
- [14:06] connecting literature with tea
- [15:36] themed tea’s as a mode of learning
- [20:28] sparking your child’s interest in tea
- [22:56] boys and tea
- [26:00] tea time foods
- [28:56] how the Three Sisters tea room got started
- [34:25] tips for getting started with tea time in your homeschool
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