Mind your Manners Tea Party!

When Donsuemor offered to send me some cookies if I hosted a tea party, I could not resist.  First off, Donsuemor makes pretty incredible cookies, they let me try some for THIS recipe I made. Secondly, it may be my British heritage, or my affinity for sweets but I can't resist a Tea party!

 When thinking of hosting a Tea Party, I knew I wanted to get my kids involved.  I also have been trying to help my kids learn to have enough manners to successfully eat somewhere fancy, maybe a Pizza joint, yup we have a lot of work ahead of us!  We invited a couple friends to the party, I did not buy anything special for this party, I used (or borrowed) decorations we had on hand, the fancy Donsuemor Cookies were the star of the show!

We started off our Mind your Manners Tea Party with a book. We read the book Tea For Ruby by Sarah Ferguson The Duchess of York.  

 

If you are not familiar with this book you are missing out.  It is about  spunky little Ruby who is a little over zealous to be invited to have Tea with the Queen!

After the book, we talked about some of the manners Ruby was working on. Then we focused on five {basic} manners.

These are the rules we talked about.

1. Say please and thank you
2. Elbows off the table
3. Chew with you mouth CLOSED
4. Napkin in your lap
5. Speak kind words

I made the manners we talked about into cute printables, I made manner flowers for the girls, and rough tough manner footballs for the boys!  I printed them off and cut the shapes out, and taped them to some straws.  You can find all the printables HERE in my Photobucket album.

By each place setting I had a jar filled with dried beans. 

 I placed the manner printables to the side of the place setting. We worked on having good manners, as they demonstrated a good manner on their manner flowers (or footballs) such as place napkin in your lap, they could put it in their jar. This was a good visual!

The kids had a lot of fun trying to get each of their good manners in the jar!

 As we ate delicious Donsuemor cookies, we worked on good manners!  These cookies by the way are fabulous, and I am usually a strictly homemade cookie type of gal! Donsuemor cookies are not hard, they are soft on the inside and a little crispy around the edges, so delicious!  My favorite cookie was the Lemon Zest Madeleine! Having these pre-made treats was a great way to help me simplify the party, and the kids knew that they were so fancy and special!

 We sipped on Martinelli's Sparkling cider our guests brought, talked about good manners, and had a fun time!  It was refreshing to hear please and thank you, and will you please pass the cookies!

 Even football players need good manners!

 This was a fun and simple way to start teaching about good manners at the table.  I was so happy tonight when my kids kept saying please and thank you at the dinner table.  We left a vase at the table with the manner flowers, to help us remember our manners!

What do you do to help your kids learn manners?

Thank you Donsuemor for providing the delicious cookies for our tea party!