A restaurant set is usually made up of two parts – the waiter/ waitress and the customer.
The primary concept of the restaurant set is that one person (the customer) will place an order or make a request, while another (the waiter/ waitress) responds to this request in some way. The ‘customer’ may not always be human; it can be an animal or even a food item.
The restaurant set is also known as the waiter/ waitress game, order game, telephone game and kitchen-garden game.
Some people are using this kind of play in real life, especially professional actors who are playing this set for children at schools or kindergartens to perform one of their play-skills – dealing with other people.
Advantages of having a restaurant set:
– Improves role-playing skills and helps with social interaction.
– Teaches how to deal with other people’s requests.
– Uses object manipulation as part of acting (e.g. using different voices for different customers).
Disadvantages of having a restaurant set:
It is not clear if this kind of play is beneficial for children or not. It can cause problems if there’s somebody at the playground who manipulates it in an unacceptable way (e.g. making fun of other kids).
Variants:
– The restaurant set can vary depending on what you want to achieve with your playgroup . You may want to introduce how different professions work, or how to take orders and serve food, etc.
– You can simply let the kids play it as a playground game (e.g. like the freeze tag), without any educational purpose behind it – just for fun and entertainment purposes.
– The rule of taking turns can be used when playing this set with several children at once. When you’re playing this with two participants, it is usually one customer and one waiter.
– You can make the order as general or as specific as you want to (e.g. taking orders for milk or cookies).
– It can be played in a lot of different ways – depending on the creativity of your kids (e.g. a car can be a customer and a bus driver can be a waiter).
– You can experiment with different vocabularies, accents and styles of the game.
– You can perform this set in different settings (e.g. in the school kitchen or restaurant).