The children enthusiastically started role-playing with their class’s kitchen set and soon found out that many more items and space were needed to operate their ‘restaurant’. The K4 teachers, Emma Li and Dioni Wise, helped to provide materials such as plates, cutlery, aprons, menus, in addition to moving the furniture around. They also introduced the children to different roles people have in a restaurant.

An important task for the children was to find a name for their restaurant. They collaboratively agreed on naming it ‘Sweet Restaurant’ (甜甜恭喜餐厅). They used inventive spelling to write ‘Svt Rstrant’ on a large sign. Inventive spelling is the educational practice of children spelling unfamiliar words based on their phonetic knowledge. The teachers also provided bilingual labels of food and kitchen items. To build their communication skills, the young learners were introduced to phrases used in a restaurant, like “What would you like to order?”.

The menu is the core piece of every restaurant and the children explored pricing when they assigned prices to items on their menu. While pretending to be a cashier, some children counted play money and did simple addition to calculate the bill. At times, the restaurant became crowded and not only a waiting line with chairs was formed but also waiting cards with numbers written on them. At first, the numbers were randomly written but within the process of creating a proper working waiting line, the children acquired the knowledge of sequencing and learned about ordinal words.