Kindergarten Fun!: "Let's Play Tea Party!"

When you walk into the kindergarten classroom, you will hear excited voices, see smiling faces and children playing. You will not see worksheets or rows of desks, but kids spread across the room interacting with each other and exploring the materials and toys in their environment.

Play encourages children to take risks, make connections to the world and provides opportunities to practise what they are learning.

One of our favourite areas to play in is the house corner. Students get to dress up and imagine they are fire fighters, police officers, astronauts, Moms, Dads, babies and even animals. After dressing up, they put out pretend fires, bake pretend cupcakes and the list goes on and on.

To encourage children's play to grow and go deeper, adults may need to join in. The adults role is to model appropriate language and behaviour, bring new ideas or problems to be solved and can help bring in materials that encourage literacy or numeracy concepts.

With the help of Mrs. Mitchell (Speech and Language Pathologist) and many other adults, we built on the students love of dressing up and playing house and hosted a Super Fancy Dress up Tea Party.

To set the stage, we read different books about dressing up and using our manners. We wrote invitations, made placemats and even created fancy feather decorations for the tables.

First we painted fancy paper

At group time, we practised sketching feathers.
We had to sketch five feathers and then write the number.

Then we sketched five more feathers on our fancy paper and cut them out.
It was a lot of hard work, but everybody tried their best and didn't give up.

After counting down on the calendar, it was finally time for our Tea Party. With our tea cups in hand and dressed in our fanciest outfits. We were ready to play! "Let's Play Tea Party!"

The afternoon class introduced themselves and asked the fancy guests what their names were. We learned that this is the polite thing to do when you meet someone new. Then we reviewed what good manners look like and sound like.

We had to find our table by looking for our names on the fancy feather table decorations. It was hard for some of us not to run over to the tables and start eating the cookies right away. We tried our very best to be patient and have safe hands.

Mrs. Reimer encouraged us to use please and thank you.

Mrs. Mitchell modelled how to politely ask for tea.
She also asked us to smell the tea and try to describe it. "It smells like berries."
Not everyone liked the taste of the tea. We learned to politely decline instead of making a face or sound.

Mrs. Aremu and Ms. Carmichael reminded us to not reach way across the table.
We practised waiting our turn and asking our friends to pass things to us.

The morning class started their tea party with a special skit put by some familiar faces. Mrs. Mitchell showed very bad manners and was grabbing things. Mrs. McDonald helped her make better choices and encouraged her to use her manners.

Mrs Dale helped us remember not to reach and to wait our turn.

Mrs. Mitchell helped us politely ask for tea and had a lovely conversation with her table guests.

Ms. Dowd reminded her table guests to only take one cookie at a time to make sure everyone got a treat.

After the Tea Party, we reviewed all the things we had practised. It was suggested that we turn the house corner into a tea party centre! We worked together and made a list of all the things that we would need. We quickly gathered all the needed items and even checked off each item.