Level One: Unit 13

May I Take Your Order, Please?

The activities below provide fun exercises for the entire class when you have extra time. They are designed to be taught with specific exercises in this unit. Click on an activity in the list below or scroll down the page.

Restaurant Chez Moi

What's your opinion?

Restaurant guide

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Restaurant Chez Moi

This activity is designed to be taught with Exercise 7, "Grammar Focus: Modal verbs would and will for requests."

Time: 15–20 minutes. This activity can be fun and encourages students to be creative. In pairs or groups, students prepare menus in English for their own restaurants.

Brainstorm with the class on which categories students might want to include in a restaurant menu that is written in English. Write students' suggestions on the board – for example:

Restaurant Menu

Appetizers Main dishes Desserts

Soups Side dishes Beverages

Salads
Elicit some unusual dishes that students might want to add to their menus, depending on the "fantasy" restaurant they are creating it for. Then model how to provide short descriptions for several menu items – for example:

nasi goreng = an Indonesian dish of fried rice topped with chicken and egg
sushi = individual pieces of thinly sliced raw fish on top of slightly pickled white rice with spicy Japanese horseradish
Students form pairs or groups and write their menus. Encourage students to think up a clever name for their make-believe restaurant.
Students put their handmade menus on the bulletin board for the rest of the class to see and compare. Find out if the class wants to vote on the best or the most interesting menu.
Optional: Students use their own menu (or another pair's or group's menu) to have a quick role play activity – as in Exercise 8 on page 84 – that involves some students ordering a meal while another takes their orders. Alternatively, make photocopies of some real restaurant menus written in English that you and the students have collected; use them for an extra role play activity.

What's your opinion?

This activity is designed to be taught with Exercise 11, "Reading: To tip or not to tip?"

Time: 10 minutes. This exercise practices giving opinions and making short responses.

Explain the activity: Each student writes down statements that express his or her strong opinions about five things. These statements should be about things that other students in the class may also know something about. In addition, the statements should be generally of a light and inconsequential nature. Give some examples like these:

I think the food in the school cafeteria is terrible!
I can't stand the color of the new building next door!
I hate heavy metal music!
I think Star Wars is a really terrific movie!
Students work individually to write their five statements. Walk around the class and give help as needed.
With the whole class, students take turns reading one of their opinions aloud. Then they name a classmate, and he or she must make a suitable response with so, too, neither, or either when agreeing, or use other expressions for contrastive responses, like this:

Student 1: I think the food in the school cafeteria is terrible! What's your opinion, Terry?
Student 2: Yeah, I do, too . . . . Uh, I love to eat kiwi fruit! May?
Student 3: Ugh! Oh, I don't! I can't stand them. Jay, . . . ?

Restaurant guide

This activity is designed to be taught with Exercise 11, "Reading: To tip or not to tip?"

Time: 10–15 minutes in class; 1–2 hours outside class. This activity is a natural follow-up to the writing assignment in Exercise 10 on page 84. Here, however, students write a local restaurant guide.

Explain the project: Students work in groups of three to five. Each group chooses a different area of the town or city (e.g., near your school, downtown, in a nearby shopping mall) and writes a local restaurant guide for it.
The task is to make a list of three to five interesting places to eat. Then the group visits each one and writes a brief description of it – for example:
Each group chooses one area of the city and plans which restaurants to include in the guide. Have them also schedule when they can go out together (or separately) to investigate the places on their list. Then they write the guide together as a group project.
After the guides are written, groups put them on the bulletin board for the rest of the class to see. Or all of the guides could be combined, photocopied, and stapled into a larger class-made "Local Restaurant Guide" with a copy for each student to keep.