I think sometimes as teachers we work so hard to create and prepare lessons that will be meaningful for our students, that we forget that the best lessons will teach us something too. Often this comes in the form of reflection, but sometimes what you’re able to create with a class is something bigger than the lesson plan ever intended. I’ve been lucky enough to have found myself in this situation a handful of times. The most recent was last June when a colleague and I decided to run a café with our classes.
Like all good ideas, it started with a dream. My colleague was in her Victory Lap (last year of teaching) and wanted to end with a project that would be remembered. We’d both done project based learning before with our classes but as we started planning we realized we both believed in the old adage, “go big or go home”.
In the beginning, we looked at recipes that we could have the students prepare and serve using greens that my class grew in our multiple tower gardens. The plan was to serve salads and soups and maybe a dessert. This quickly became three different soups, three different salads, a signature non-alcoholic cocktail, and three different desserts. While we were at it, why not add in a couple of biscuit recipes as well?
So we began talking with our classes about food choices, meal prep, and locally locally sourced ingredients. This quickly led to fields trips to the local grocery stores to budget and price check, and a local farm to source extra salad greens and work on the timing of our own grow operations. We then visited a restaurant to learn about food prep, serving, creating menus, and cooking for large groups. These fabulous people helped our 3rd, 4th, and 6th graders understand how to run a business we still weren’t sure we could pull off. But every Friday we got together to make different food and eat together while different groups of kids practiced serving and the skill most needed in the food industry- dishwashing.
Our District Career Programs Coordinator offered to bring up grad students and faculty from SFU to work with us on logo design and branding, so now we were in the marketing business too. The students all created potential designs and then we chose one and had it put onto a stamp for us to brand our placemats, aprons, and t-shirts.
We made friends with anyone who had a tent that we could borrow for our café. We provided free lunch to the village employees who brought us community tables and chairs to use for our two day event. We got to know the high school principal early so that we could ask to borrow his golf cart to transport our guests up the steep hill to our café on top field. We hunted down every crockpot and salad bar that we could from staff at the school. And we cut off all access to top field to 180 students for three days so we could run a “real” restaurant. We made a trip to Costco for ingredients with a price tag that would shock mere mortals and completely decimated both of our class funds after several years of fundraising and holding back money every year for “something big”.
It was almost time and the kids were excited. In matching t-shirts proudly identifying them as staff of Café 346, we finished our final preparations. We made hundreds of wontons for soup, cut salad and soup fixings until we dulled knives, baked until the school kitchen became a furnace, and learned how to plate food. We practiced sitting and serving people, made menus in the computer lab, met with the health inspector and had him go through expectations with us, and set up tents, tables, chairs, and décor on top field. Two flights of stairs every time we went up there!
We had four sitting each day and students rotated through roles: phone reservations and confirmation, kitchen prep, food prep, tent prep (plating), serving, busing, host, runner, bartender, transportation, parking, cashier, dishwasher, etc. Was it seamless? No, but pretty close considering the staff was all between the ages of 8-12. We ran eight tables of six for each sitting, had a makeshift kitchen under a tent in the ball diamond, and had kids running between the prep kitchen up on top field and the real kitchen hundreds of time during the day. It was amazing.
In the end, we met 91 of the learning outcomes for grade six. We also made back most of our fundraising money thanks to tips from our generous patrons. In our debrief after the café, it was the kids who were able to tell us why we didn’t make as much money as we’d hoped. They understood that our ingredients cost more than we charged, we lost money shopping local- though that was important to them, and trading labour for meals cut into our profit margin but was necessary due to our age. There was also a class wide snacking incident that resulted in an unexpected additional batch of cheesecake parfaits. Lesson learned.
Would I do it again? Probably. But it feels more daunting now that I know how much work goes into it. The dream and excitement kept us going but it was done on the back of a lot of physical and mental labour for both teachers and students. It took months of planning, two solid months of weekly work, and ten days of chaos to make it happen. It was also expensive
What made this memorable was the work. And the connections to our community. And the way we pulled off something people didn’t expect elementary students could. They felt proud, and I was proud of them. I could go on and on about all the learning that happened outside of the classroom. Or about how the kids who really stepped up weren’t always the one I expected. But mostly, I loved how we worked as a team. When I see my former students, now at the high school, wearing their Café 346 shirts around town, I think maybe it made the impression we hoped it would.
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