Our Intl Tea Lesson

Last year, 3の1 (my International Studies kids) studied American culture and cultural differences, even doing an exchange with my old high school in America. This year, however, the focus is on Japan and Japanese culture.

The syllabus is set up so that the students do one lecture in Japanese and then repeat the same class - or at least follow the same theme - in English. It's my job to go to the Japanese lessons (or get the worksheets from them and have a teacher explain to me what they did) and then plan something along the same lines for the English classes.

At first I sort of hated the structure and I didn't think it was working well (my five plus hours of prep for the Language History lesson didn't seem to pay off when a few of the kids didn't care about the subject in any langauge and said the class was "stupid"), but I'm starting to find it kind of fun.

Recently, we've been learning about National Holidays, National Events (like the Star Festival on 7/7) and now Tea Ceremony. After doing a little quiz, going over some vocab and showing a powerpoint about Tea Ceremonies, my colleague and I did demonstrations of a Japanese and British Tea Ceremony. I did Cream Tea, but both of us definitely had to do a little research and practice beforehand. So far, it's going well.

Anyways, I just wanted to show some pictures from our first (of two) lesson s on tea ceremonies from around the world:

I also sort of liked these shots of of tea houses from around the world that I found online. I used them in my powerpoint about tea traditions. This is a tea house in...

Kyoto, Japan

Kanazawa, Japan

Nanjing, ChinaGlasgow, , Scotland

And finally, these are the Willow Tea Rooms in Scotland