Following on from yesterday’s menu, and the menu game worksheets in the food & drinks themes, here’s a new twist.

1. Put the kids in groups
2. Give them all a copy of the same food menu.
3. Tell them a total price you want to pay.
4. In the groups they have to come up with what food you can buy for that price.
5. After a few minutes each group reads out what they recommend.
6. Either give them points for the most delicious choices or for getting nearest to the budget without going over.
7. Repeat with a new budget. ( Pretend you’ve just found some more money in your pocket!)

This way the kids don’t just listen to the food names, they have to say them. If you like you can bring in this week’s “How many?” theme as well, e.g. the kids say “A 150g steak” and you say “How many?”, “Just one!” is the answer they’ll usually need. You can also make the rule that any group that uses non-English when discussing what to recommended loses a dollar from their budget. Just be careful there is nothing on the menu for a dollar as the clever kids will say “23 bread rolls” or whatever.

The key here is to use fun menus like the Genki English ones for non-literate students, or for kids that have done phonics then real menus certainly bring things alive. They don’t need to be able to read everything, just enough to do the game. And where to find these funky real menus? Google of course! But… the trick is not to do a normal google search, but to do a google image search. If you add in “lunch menu”, “breakfast menu” etc. you can get even more.