Our First Cup of Tea

This week our class began looking at our service project for the year. Our entire schools is participating in a year of service and each class or, in our case, grade level, has chosen a cause to support and will be doing various projects for that cause throughout the year.

The Kindergarten classes this year will be supporting Pennies for Peace (www.penniesforpeace.org). We will be learning about the cultures of Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the year and comparing them to our culture here in the United States. We will also be collecting pennies in our classrooms and at several events during the year such as a booth at our fall festival on October 1st and a free dress day for 100 pennies on the 100th day of school.

Pennies for Peace is a project sponsored by the Central Asia Institute, which helps to provide education, schools, and supplies to children who live in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. For more information about these schools you can check out Greg Mortenson's books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools. There is also a children's book based on his work called Listen to The Wind, which we read in our classroom on Thursday.

After reading Listen to the Wind and watching some of the videos available from Pennies for Peace we talked about what it would be like to live somewhere where we didn't have school. We learned that in Korphe, where Dr. Greg built his first school, the children were only able to have a teacher 3 days a week and did their schoolwork outside with sticks in the dirt. The children realized how blessed we are to have all of the neat things that we have at our school and even how blessed we are to have a physical school building!

We read that 1 penny, which can buy hardly anything in the United States, can buy a pencil and that 2$ can pay a teacher's salary for a day! I was very impressed when we came to school on Friday to have several students bring in LOTS of pennies! I can tell that they are really getting excited about our cause!

On Friday we had scheduled our very first Tea Party. In Three Cups of Tea one of the village elders says to Dr. Greg

The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea.

This quote is the basis of our Tea Parties this year. We are going to have 3 throughout the year to show how we become family over the course of our time together.

Our first tea party was a HUGE success! Our room parents got together and used the "Mad Hatter" theme from Alice in Wonderland! We followed the bunny tracks on the sidewalk over to the church for our tea party and then had wonderful and delicious "Eat Me" snacks and "Drink Me" drinks! We also had adorable cut outs for the children to have their pictures taken as the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat. The children looked so adorable! We had a free dress day and children were able to dress to impress for the special occasion... and BOY did they!

This was a really fun time for our families to come and join us and for us all to "share a cup of tea" together. It was nice to take the time to foster the relationships in our classrooms and in our Kindergarten community.

We hope, as we get this project up and moving, that we will be able to encourage our children to find ways to give back to their community and to help others in need. We hope that, not only, we can raise money to help out the schools across the world, but that our students will be life-long helpers of those in need.