Tea and the Japanese Tradition of Chanoyu lessons developed by the Stanford Program on International and Cross Cultural Education (SPICE) provides students in the middle and high school with a unique opportunity that honors all children’s cultures and values by developing creative strategies for including and expanding connections between personal communities and the larger world. The teacher facilitates the students’ development by helping them engage in active investigations that build knowledge and understanding.
Its goals and objectives could be extended far below the middle school into early elementary, kindergarten. Pa core 8.4 K.A. states “Explain how cultures celebrate. The learner will: identify and discuss their own method of celebrating, compare and contrast methods of celebrating with peers, and use digital media to explore ways various cultures celebrate.” Our kindergarten uses passports to pretend travel across the world to various countries to learn about dress, foods, and traditions that they compare and contrast with their own. With tea as common a drink in restaurants as water, our kindergarteners already have prior knowledge about it being prepared hot as well as cold. Many children already have a preference in ingredients. However, they don’t know that it comes from plants or that in other countries tea is not served as an afterthought to the meal but as an important, revered commodity.
These lessons could easily be transformed to a more tactile/kinesthetic approach. On Pinterest, there are lots of free, large scale black and white drawings of all things Japanese. The students could color and cut them out to display on a Japanese interactive bulletin board with vocabulary. The Smartboard Exchange has adorable animated characters who perform the tea ceremony interactively with the students correcting etiquette as it goes along. Students could explore literature about sharing tea in such books as Tea Ceremony by Shozo Sato, The Way We Do It In Japan by Geneva Cobb Iijima, and I Live in Tokyo by Mari Takabayashi. The culminating activity could be students entering the classroom without their shoes and sharing pretend tea with a partner mimicking the actions of adults actually sharing. Then they could sip real tea and eat some Japanese snacks such as Pocky, Pretz, or Kit Kats.
