Every year, Madame Kelly (Sahuaro’s French teacher), gives her 2nd-year students a big project for the end of the year. This project consists of you getting into a group of 4 or 5, and planning out a French restaurant complete with a full menu that you will later make come to life. Madame Kelly has been doing this for, “At least 15 years because I was already doing it at Santa Rita where I taught before I came to Sahuaro.”

The beginning steps of this project were to create a theme, come up with a name, and create a culturally relevant menu that includes appetizers, main dishes, side dishes, desserts, and drinks. We would later have to make one item from each of these categories to serve the rest of the students in class. We also had to come up with an accurate address, email, social media, and phone number for the front of the menu.

It took beaucoup research and time to find good recipes that you would actually find on a menu in France, and Alex said “I am so excited for this project to be over so I don’t have to worry about perfecting it anymore.” But once we did that hard step, the rest of the project was very fun.

We all had to use an extra classroom at the top of the 100 building to create our restaurant on different dates to give the students the full experience. My group’s restaurant date was Tuesday, April 25th, so we used most of the class period Monday, April 24th setting up and decorating everything. Then when Tuesday came along, we had to bring in the homemade food we all made the night before to serve to the class.

My group’s food items included, appetizer: cheese sticks; main dish: chicken and rice; side dish: garlic green beans; and desert: French donuts.

Serving all of the food was stressful because we had to make sure it was all warm and we had enough for everyone. But overall, it was a lot of fun and I’m glad I got to experience it for my final big project. Mia came up to me today and said, “I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I’m glad we get to relax and just enjoy being guests at the next restaurant.”

Once the last group does their restaurant, the whole class is going to have an “award” show to highlight the people who had the best decorations, best food, best dressed for the occasion, etc. Hopefully, we win something!