Arvo Tea and Bibops

I love working with children. I love that the children in my room are learning to speak and so pick up a lot of things from us, or create their own words.

We've been teaching most of our older children, 16-20month olds, to say 'ta' when we give them their food etc. They've not only picked up saying 'ta' in these situations, but they also like to use it when they want us or other children to take things. The most common time for them to say 'ta' is after they have wiped their hands for meal times. Our youngest child, now 12 months, has recently begun to say 'ta' too, and it is so adorable. His parents have also begun to gel his hair up, which looks so adorably funky.

Another phrase I've been trying to teach the children is 'Arvo Tea'. We have a morning tea and an afternoon tea at work. Most of the children can say morning tea, and excitedly chant "morning tea, morning tea" when they see the food tray come to our room. They also chant 'morning tea' when afternoon tea comes to the room. I started trying to teach them 'afternoon tea' but quickly decided 'afternoon' was too long for them to pick up so switched to 'arvo tea' as arvo means afternoon in Aussie.  I wasn't seeing much success in this approach until yesterday when one of our children started chanting "Arvo tea! Arvo tea!" in the afternoon. It made me pretty happy.

The child who picked up the phrase 'arvo tea' is one of our better speakers. She has an adorable word for lollipops (which we like to make with playdough and popsicle sticks), calling them 'bibops'. Today I was trying to correct this to lollipop asking her if she could say "LOLLI-pop", the best I could get out of her was "lolli-bibop". Too cute.