Tea Ceremony Essay

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Tea Ceremony Suzanne York Grade Level: 2-3 Time needed: 40-60 minutes. Several days to introduce lessons about calligraphy, ikebana, and origami into the tea ceremony. Objective: To give students an understanding of the importance of tea in Japanese culture. Students plan their own classroom tea ceremony for special guests and prepare for it with some more Japanese traditional customs, such as origami invitations and ikebana flower arranging. Students think about traditions passed from their ancestors that give them a sense of their own identity. Vocabulary: culture: the attitudes, values and social practices that people share. identity: the distinguishing characters that help a person to feel unique chanoyu – tea ceremony ikebana- flower arranging ahodo-calligraphy origami- art of Japanese paper folding Materials Needed: tea, tea pots and cups, tea cakes (could be rice balls or tea cakes, or a variety of foods listed in the text, origami paper, calligraphy brushes, ink, an bamboo paper (if possible), a variety of flowers and greens for table decoration, “frogs” – a type of spikey flower holder that holds the flower stems erect and in place, etc. Background Information: Tea, one of the most important commodities that was traded between China and other world ports, also became an important tradition in Japan and many other parts of Asia. The “tea ceremony” is not really a ceremony at all. Deeply rooted in Chinese Zen philosophy, it is rather a tradition of communing with nature and friends and escape the more mundane daily routines of day-to-day work and living in an attempt to relax and seek “inner peace”. Procedures: Ask students, how would you describe your identity? Gather their ideas and answers and chart them. Recognize that most likely many of their ideas describe traditions handed to them from the culture they live in. Say:
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