Restaurant Review Writing Project

If you are looking for some homeschool writing tips, you’ve come to the right place! Maybe you’ve been wanting to teach your kids writing in a more engaging way, or break out of a rut. Maybe you haven’t done any formal writing instruction yet, and are not sure where to start. I’ve been there! I recently started a blogging series called Our Homeschool Writing Experiment, where I document my own 180 from discouragement, to inspiration.

If you’re interested, check out the first post in the series for some context. I also wrote a shorter post about how to make learning collaborative if you’re schooling multiple grade levels. My husband and I have four kids, three of which are school-age right now. One example of tailoring a writing assignment for all three of them came just this week.

Genre Variety & Repetition

When we started this writing experiment, I knew I wanted to expose my kids to multiple genres of writing. If I had them writing only informative essays and imaginative stories all year, I knew we would all burn out or become bored of doing too much of the same thing. So, after doing some research I created a spreadsheet with 15 different genres I wanted to try out!

I decided to repeat a homeschool writing project from first semester this year: A Restaurant Review! One of my simplest homeschool writing tips is: REPETITION! Repetition in instruction is a simple concept with which I have seen profound results, in our homeschool. We first did a Restaurant Review this fall, so my kids have already done it once this year. We also did a lengthier project last week (Animal Research Essay), so, this week I opted for something a bit more relaxed. Enter, Restaurant Review!

Tailoring Writing Instruction To More Than One Grade Level

Our kids are currently aged: 18 months, 4, 8, & 10, so we don’t frequent any eloquent restaurants with them quite yet. 🙂 We went out to a simple chain restaurant this morning and got brunch–my favorite food! I had the kids skim over the Restaurant Review questions in advance, to remember what types of things to observe. We observed things like: general atmosphere of the restaurant, the service, how fast their food came, how it tasted, etc. We often talk about service in different retail places, and what is involved in various community jobs. It’s great to be aware of different jobs in your community, and have your kids thinking about what type of first jobs they’d like to try as teens!

Here is a sample of one of our completed Restaurant Reviews:

And here is a sample from their final Restaurant Review Essay!

If you’d like to try this project with your own kids, you can browse more details here. I created this resource to include students aged Pre-K to 5th grade. Along with two different forms, there are also pre-teaching ideas, and ways to create an essay after the review is completed. Lastly, I included a two-page, basic essay format to use as a follow-up, if your kids are doing an essay after the review form itself. A Restaurant Review project is an awesome project that can include your whole family!

I hope this was helpful for you! Try a restaurant review sometime soon, and if you need a print-and-go template to do so, check out mine here!

Cait