Creating Our Coffee Shop

The children have been interested in serving people at restaurants.  We started transforming our Kitchen Area into a place that focused on taking orders and eating food in a restaurant type setting. We received some donations of mugs from a family and once we added those and more spoons to the Kitchen Area, the children began acting like they were in a Coffee Shop.

Initially, they mimicked a lot of actions they see from adults in their life. 

"This coffee is so hot. I need more milk." 

"I have to be very careful - I need to stir it a lot before I drink it."

It was interesting to see the children pretend playing and working together as they sort through their ideas of relating real life to their dramatic play experience. 

The children are focused on stirring, pouring, and having conversations. We have talked about other coffee shops that we are familiar with - Starbucks and Tim Hortons were the most popular during discussion. 

Sophia pours coffee for a classmates as she tells her,"I have your coffee for you. You should blow on it first. It is very hot!" She was very carefully when pouring and put the pot back to the stove when finished. She continued by offering coffee to the other children. 

Using a notepad and pencil, Hadi takes another child's order, "I'll have a hot coffee!" Hadi responds, "Okay. That will be right here." He turned to the Kitchen Area and prepared the coffee by pretending to pour and stir in the mug before giving it to Evan. 

 Today we named our coffee shop, "Bart's Coffee Shop". The children talked about what type of name they would like - Holly suggested, "Bart's", and the rest of the focus group agreed to it. We made signs and created an open/closed sign to use. 

Throughout this exploration over the past few weeks, the children have been strengthening their social skills, communication skills, and turn taking. The children are using more discussions while adding more vocabulary to their play. They are also strengthening math and literacy skills as they take orders and discuss prices of each item. As the children explore the different roles of the coffee shop they are discovering the ideas of responsibilities, jobs, and manners during interactions with one another. 

In the future, we will discuss further the ideas of each of these roles - a customer, a server, and a   Barista, talking about prices and exploring menus from actual coffee shops. I would like to extend this idea to the other classrooms and see how we can take this shop to the next level.