In my “must improvise” class today, I was fighting hard to come up with a project that would take the time needed to fill up the class. I scrounged up a sheet of unlabeled food related pictures, a few sticks of glue, scissors, and some paper.

We never, EVER do crafts or projects in the school. There isn’t any manner in which to do them easily. Yet today, I did the impossible and managed an art project that kept students busy and entertained.

Part of this was luck. The students in the class, besides the lazy boy, are self-motivated, driven children that love to show their creative ability with the language. I exploited this desire by making a more open ended assignment than they are used to completing.

I told them to take the food sheet and select foods from the different categories they would need to make a restaurant menu. They needed to choose a meat, vegetable, fruit, snack, and  drink. Which they chose, and how they arranged their menu was up to them. All it needed was a picture, a label and a “price” of some kind.

Students wanted to know the details. Could they fold their menus, or would it be okay to have it as a sign? What were they supposed to call the restaurant? I told them it was their restaurant, not mine. I told them that after they finished the menu, we would use it to “order” a meal, so if it didn’t look good, we wouldn’t eat at their location. They also got to set prices and whatnot. Some students went on to offer “set” items and illustrated their entire menu.

I went for a theme restaurant. I would combine any two foods on the menu to make something disgusting and monstrous. “Unhealthy Fat Man’s Restaurant” featured delicious menu items such as “donut pizza”, “fried cake with French fry candles”, “chocolate milk noodles”, and “honey pancakes” (which I would actually eat, truth be told). I had a lot of fun cutting out the pictures and modifying them to make nauseating food. The students kept trying to get me to one up myself too. They seemed to have standards about the food they would serve at their mock restaurants, so no one put “poo” on their menu.

For an entire class, they worked on getting the best menu to impress their classmates. They even asked to be allowed to bring the project home so they could have their mother’s help. I declared there would be a prize for the best menu in the class, and one boy said his mom was going to help him color the entire thing. Awesome.