Create Your Own Restaurant

Encouraging kids to get creative in the classroom is a great way of getting them to learn English without them even realising. The last few weeks of June are a treat for the kids where they've finished the Y.L.E. book, all the exams, and the classroom can be a more dynamic and interesting place. It´s a time to focus on projects that get the kids thinking in different ways. 

Last June, each of my 3rd grade classes were separated into groups of three for a "Create Your Own Restaurant" project. Each group had to come up with a design for the restaurant, a menu, and uniforms for the waiters and waitresses.

They had three weeks to come up with an idea, discuss various possibilities, draw their designs, write the menu, and finally present the results in front of the class, all of this done through English, of course. It was a little harder than usual to get them to only speak in English as they got really excited about the project and would start chatting in Spanish.

This stopped once I introduced a three minute penalisation of no talking or writing if I heard anything apart from English. It worked! 

The results were amazing!
The creativity that these kids showed was astounding… zero-gravity restaurants in space, underwater ones where the staff wear bikinis and bathing suits, roller restaurants where the customers are served by waiters on roller skates and one restaurant floating in the sky.