Connoquenessing Elementary students serve food in unique project
CONNOQUENESSING TWP — The Mushroom Cafe was full of customers Thursday afternoon, April 3, requiring the staff of third-grade students to take customers’ orders quickly to relay to the cooking staff, who filled orders for quesadilla wraps, salads and lemonade.
Marisa Crissman, a third-grade teacher at Connoquenessing Elementary School, said this mock restaurant project is not exactly what she envisioned when students first took interest in her mushroom growing kit at the start of the school year. However, the endeavor turned out to be a great project that naturally led the students to learn many life lessons over the course of half a year.
“We started researching which ones we could eat, and we looked at recipes with mushrooms. We went out on the trail and looked for mushrooms,” Crissman said. “This is like a life skill. When they look at what jobs they can have, they can look back at this.”
The Mushroom Cafe was the culmination of all the prep work students put in throughout the year. While Crissman and other school personnel and parents helped turn the school into a simulated restaurant, the students themselves were the engine that got customers — parents and friends of students — in and out the door Thursday.
“The students came up with the jobs,” Crissman said, “then they interviewed with the principal and she would say, ‘I think she would be good for this,’ or, ‘He would be good at this.’ Then I helped decide what they would do.”
Crissman’s class of about 20 students all wore uniforms Thursday, which had their restaurant jobs printed on their backs, with titles like “hostess,” “cook,” “cashier” and even “manager.” Each student performed one duty that would be found at a typical café, but they all worked together to make sure the operation ran smoothly.
Nicholas Steighner, a third-grader at the school, said the students’ work started long ago, when they first began watering lettuce on the grow tower.
“We started the second month of school,” Nicholas said. “We had our grow cart, and we had to water it and put it under light every day.”
Third-grader Colten Organ said a lot of the work on the café came together quickly, when students learned that people would be coming to eat at the school. His role was in food prep Thursday, the day of the café opening.
“We started cooking today and yesterday,” Colten said.
As “customers” finished their plates and cups, students would come around to bus the tables and ask if diners needed anything else. Those being served at the café were nothing but complimentary to the students, giving kudos like “great job” and “the pesto was excellent” to the staff on their way out the door. The customers paid the cashiers as they left, and some even bought student artwork and left tips for the Mushroom Cafe staff as well.
Crissman said some of the students were stressed about how working the restaurant would go, but working through hiccups — like a shortage of ice for the lemonade — was part of the learning experience at the simulated café.
“The main thing was they were worried about something going wrong,” Crissman said. “They saw that things can go wrong — like they didn’t have ice.”
Each of the seven elementary schools in Butler Area School District has a specific focus, with Connoquenessing Elementary’s being outdoor appreciation. The school has a greenhouse, a garden area in the middle courtyard as well as a nature trail that leads through some woods, where teachers lead classes focused on environmental awareness.
Tamila Normand, a special-education teacher at the school, helped with the Mushroom Cafe, and said students took to the gardening aspects of the restaurant rather quickly. Not only did they get to work with plants outside and scour the nature trail for unique organisms, they got to work with plants indoors, and they could tend to the lettuce cart if stressed.
Normand pointed out that the aspects relating to outdoor appreciation could be an escape for all the children in the school.
“For kids who needed a break, they could walk over to the grow cart and spray the cart,” Normand said. “It’s a very relaxing activity for them.”
Crissman said while the Mushroom Cafe was a fun and exciting opportunity for her students, she may not make it an annual project. The third-graders took to the mushroom growing kits this year, but next year, they might find interest in another area, which Crissman said she would support by coming up with a project.
After the first round of customers left the classroom, Crissman said she could see herself bringing a service-oriented project back to her class in the future, but maybe not the Mushroom Cafe exactly.
“I try to do something different every year that’s based off their interest,” Crissman said. “It’s whatever they come up with.”
