Mother’s Day Tea Party – Tips for Hosting this Memorable School Event

I’m sharing tips for hosting a memorable Mother’s Day Tea Party for your school today. Your preschool, kindergarten, and first grade students will love creating hats, keepsake crafts, and serving their parents during this fun event!

 

I’m going to begin by sharing with you how the Mother’s Day Tea went. I am pretty sure that it was the most meaningful and touching thing I’ve EVER planned as a teacher. Let me start at the beginning.

If you haven’t read my first post about planning this event, click below:

Mother’s Day Tea – A Unique Way to Celebrate Your Students and their Moms!

If you want to plan a tea for your students, you can grab the resource by clicking on this product cover:

Most of the moms were able to attend the tea. I asked our vice principal and reading specialist to stand in for the 2 that weren’t able to.

The morning of the tea we gathered around before the moms arrived and really spent some time thinking about our mothers. I enjoyed explaining the sacrifices moms make on a daily basis for their children. You could see the light bulbs as the students began to realize how much their mothers do for them. I told the kids that they would come up one at a time during the tea to finish the sentence “I love my mom because…”. They were so excited to do that. I also explained to them that when each mom arrived, they would meet them at the door with their hat and beaded necklace. They were told to lead them to their seat and help push the chair in. Each child was to take their mom’s order and make sure their mom “paid” for it. (See menu below!)

 

We also practiced singing a couple of songs (Skinnamarinky-dinky-dink… & the song from Barney “I love you, you love me….”). The kids helped me set the tablecloths out and put the hats on the chairs.

AND THEN I had my assistant take them outside to play for about 30 minutes while I finished setting up. I told them to be careful outside because I had asked for them to be sent in their “Sunday Best”. (See post linked earlier.) If you plan one, you will definitely need to enlist some help from a couple of people. -Preferably not the moms so you can surprise them!

I was so happy with the way the room looked! I grabbed 4 plastic tablecloths from Walmart and I collect teacups so it was no problem to find those. I put a cupcake inside each teacup and added silver sprinkles. We put some of the crafts the kids made and the menu they colored on the table. I’m so glad I did that because it gave the mothers something to look at as we got everyone seated. If you don’t want to mess with hot tea or the cupcakes in the teacups, just grab some cute paper cups and serve cold sweet tea. 🙂

I hung the Tea Time Banner up beside our cubbies. (Included in the resource!)

Another assistant helped me cut up some fruit and boil the water for tea. I bought an electric tea kettle about a month ago and that worked perfectly!

See the little animal pitchers? The kids were instructed to come tell us if their mom wanted hot tea so we could safely carry it to them, but the little animals were at each table and the children loved pouring cream in for their moms.

When everything was ready, the kids answered the door one at a time. It was so sweet to see the mom’s faces when they were presented with a hat and necklace!

I loved this picture of one of my students pushing his mom’s chair in. Just like we practiced!

The kids had a lot of fun trying on the hats themselves!

We set up a little photo backdrop using the banner in the resource on TPT. While the moms started eating, I took pictures of each mother and her child.

When the moms finished their tea and food, the kids came up to sing their songs and walk up one at a time and tell why they loved their mom. They said things like, “I love my mom because she tucks me in at night.” or “I love my mom because she loves me.” It was really sweet to hear their thoughts and I was proud of how they spoke with confidence.

Finally, I read the book “I’ll Love You Forever”. The kids were in charge of saying the verse, “I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be,” on each page. When I closed the book I looked out to see many of the moms crying. It was a tear jerker!

It did take me quite a bit of time to prepare it all but I was able to save the decorations to use next year and now that I’ve made the resource I can use it again and again. You will be able to reuse it each year too as it is an EDITABLE resource!

I didn’t have to buy too much since I already had most of the materials and I just baked the cupcakes at home. I drink hot tea all day every day so I already had plenty of tea bags. 🙂

It was so worth it to me for the kids to make such sweet memories with their moms. The moms were such troopers wearing their hats and necklaces with pride. 🙂 I could tell that the moms felt very loved and that was the main goal. I definitely plan on doing this every year from now on!

What about you? Have you ever tried a Mother’s Day Tea with your students? Let me know in the comments.

Happy Teaching and Mommy-ing this week friends!