Menu Creation

Invite students to open a restaurant, beginning with creating their own menus. 

• Differentiate the activity based on student skills and next steps (e.g., encourage students to identify beginning sounds, stretch out words, and/or use their knowledge of sound-letter relationships when writing menu items).  
• Enter play as a customer, ordering items from their menu, and asking questions to encourage further detail in their writing (e.g., “I see from your menu that you sell cupcakes. Yum! What flavours of cupcakes do you sell?”). 
• Extend play by encouraging students to create restaurant signs or write down customer orders.   
• Invite students to add prices to their menus and calculate prices for their customers. 

• Pretend food for dramatic play or materials to make their own food (e.g., paper, playdough, etc.) 
• Materials to make menus and signs (paper, writing utensils, flyers or magazines to cut out pictures of food items, etc.) 
• Menus from local restaurants for inspiration 
• Math manipulatives (e.g., play money, cash register, etc.) 
• Order form (put order form in templates and provide link here)