Restaurant

Pretending is such an easy way to get your kiddos to help out and to be able to teach them valuable life skills. This week we decided to play "restaurant". I am sure many kids everywhere have played this imaginary game. I wanted to take this activity a little further. For the first part of this I had my kids go grocery shopping with me. You can't play restaurant and not have good food. We had discussed previously to going to the grocery store what would be a simple meal to make (hot pockets). While we were there, they picked out all of the produce and groceries for this meal in addition to the other groceries for the week. I had them pick out what looked good (I told them what to look for) and put it in the cart. When we checked out, they put everything on the conveyer belt and unloaded the groceries from the car when we got home. Even though I didn't take any pictures of this, they wanted me to blog about how much "behind the scenes" work they did. 

Now for the second part of "restaurant".

The most diplomatic way of assigning jobs was to have my kids to draw what they were going to do out of a hat. (You may want to do it differently depending on your kids and their ages. This is what worked for our family.) 

Kelsey was the server and menu maker

Porter actually should have been setting the table but traded with Sophie. He is the chef.

Sophie is the buss girl but didn't like the sound of that so we changed it to dish girl. She was in charge of setting and clearing the table. 

Sophie got right to work setting the table. 

She also rolled the forks in a napkin (so it would be more "fancy").

Kelsey created the menu.

The menu for tonight is:

Hot pockets (made from crescent rolls) with ham or cheese

Broccoli

Strawberries

Milk or Water 

Porter chopping broccoli.

Porter's sisters washed the strawberries while he cut them.

Everyone had decided that they wanted both cheese and ham in their "pockets"

Our finished dinner. 

Porter dished up the food on plates and Kelsey served everyone (which they thought was quite funny).

It was such a good meal! I am so proud that they did all of this (mostly) on their own. I was surprised how eager they were to do everything by themselves. On regular days their arms and legs don't work as well. It just goes to show, that when you turn things into a game, it becomes way more exciting.  

I loved doing this with my kids because they learned so many life skills while doing this. Here is a list of what they learned:

• Grocery shopping
• Picking the best produce
• Knowing good meat from the bad meat
• Looking for expiration dates
• Washing produce
• Setting a table
• Cooking on a stove
• Etiquette at the dinner table
• Enjoying what each person is doing for the other

That's just to name a few.

I hope that your "restaurant" night with your kids is just as fun as mine was!