At Nurture Through Nature tea time is a daily ritual we experience together. Rituals create a sense of security with young children and create meaningful moments throughout the day. Utilising real china teapots and cups we reflect on our day together. By offering children the experience of authentic china it facilitates their learning, exploring how to how to be careful and handle their teacup gently and also what to do when it breaks. The children enjoy setting the table with flowers and preparing the tea. we utilise flowers and herbs from our kitchen garden building connections. Lavender and rose are our favourites. The children also enjoy creating their own tea using mortar and pestles and tea strainers. When children create their own tea blends it gives them a holistic sensory experience as well as exposing them to concepts of measurement and quantity. Children enjoy grinding the children herbs and flowers and then watching the tea leaves as water is added. Sometimes the tea changes colour, which is opportunity to introduce natural dyes. Often, we will utilise the left-over tea to dye fabric or to use as watercolour paint. It’s a very exciting at Nurture Through Nature when its tea time and more often than not all of our children like to join in. The tea is lukewarm which allows all of our children including young babies to participate. We have many different tea pots to choose from with the cat tea pot a firm favourite.
“ More tea, please “
– Zac aged 2
“I like the lavender tea, because the tea turns blue, but the lavender is purple, I think the mermaids decided to make it purple because its my best colour “
– Gracelyn Aged 2