No matter what the school day may offer, there will always be a need to offer meals to keep students fed and ready to learn. Considering students will spend an average of 20 minutes in elementary and middle schools and 24 minutes for high school students in the cafeteria for lunch service each day, this will be a place everyone in your school will remember. Add on breakfast, study periods, and activities, and you have a space that you’ll want thoughtfully designed. If you’re looking for ideas, read this article to make your creative school cafeteria.
Create a Welcoming & Student-Owned Environment
With students spending most of their day in the classroom, the cafeteria is a time for relaxing and spending time with friends. As such, you don’t want to make the area appear like a dull classroom, but something that makes the area lively. Think about the places students would want to spend their free time with friends, such as a coffee shop or a mall. Making your space feel inviting can have the same effect of joy those places give to revitalize your students to tackle the rest of the day.
How do you achieve this? Look to emulate what businesses do to make their space appealing. What kinds of colors do you have on the floor, with the furniture, and on the walls? The same repeated colors can make an area seem drab and unnoticeable. A splash of color can make things stand out. A brightly colored garbage bin can not only help it stand out and be easy to find, but also add to the overall atmosphere of the space. A sign with a bright array of colors can help attract attention and help students follow directions. Some flowers or seasonal-themed decorations can help students feel the holiday spirit. Whatever concepts you use to make your home attractive, see if you can apply it to your cafeteria.
A surefire way to help a cafeteria feel welcoming is to let the students own the space. Is there an initiative you can start for students to help design the space? Whether that would be helping with decorations, creating signage or a billboard, or even painting a mural, the cafeteria will mean a lot more when the students are invested. It gives a place for students to express themselves, and conversation starters for when students do eventually sit down for a meal. Find out what the students value the most and help build a space that reflects what they and their community cherish and value.
Vary the Seating and Decor
You’ll often see similar seating between cafeterias: a rectangular table with attached stool chairs. It’s an efficient solution and easy to clean, but can lack some of the creativity we’re looking for. One option might be to go for rounded tables that have attached benches or stools, which will let students face more of their friends at once. You could also consider free-standing chairs and benches that are separate from the table so students can rearrange themselves based on their group size. You’ll want to consider the additional purposes your cafeteria will have when selecting the furniture you’ll provide. If you’ll be moving things around a lot or need to be efficient in how you use your space, that might determine what furniture will work best for you. As always, consider the colors of these furniture items, and their surface types, whether they look more wood-like, granite-like, or another artistic option.
You’ll also need to consider what furniture you may want to add for additional purposes. Furniture vendors have various options to choose from, such as smaller tables, half circles, soft seating booths and stools, and more. Some options might work better than others depending on your situation and budget, but it can give your cafeteria a unique and exciting look to have furniture besides traditional seating. It can also provide a relaxing atmosphere for study or project time. You might consider having unique furniture in a separate area or corner to differentiate what times certain furniture is used.
Design around Flow
Logistics are a big part of a school, where classroom time, hallway passing, and more are planned to the precise minute. Making the cafeteria process efficient could save you a minute or two and help steer clear of confusion and frustration. Students should learn the general process after a week or two in school, but the day-to-day changes can cause the most trouble. Is there signage easily visible, especially when students are in line, to see what food is available that day? If applicable, it might be worth installing a screen that can do a slideshow of the food of the day, along with any other helpful information, such as washing hands or school event reminders. You might be able to encourage healthy choices through fun facts about different kinds of food or what nutrition they’re getting through the meal that day.
Also, be sure to observe where kids congregate throughout the process. Might students stand in an area after getting their food that might prevent the flow of traffic? Try placing the condiment table or other items farther away from the line so students get out of the way once finished getting their food. What would be the most natural way for students to deposit their trays to avoid messes and to make it easier for staff to clean? Maybe having a tray deposit area near a garbage bin or having the bins clearly labeled where to throw away which food scraps could help simplify the process. The easier and more intuitive you make the process, the more likely students will follow the rules as you intended for the cafeteria.
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There’s so much to consider every day at school, so making the cafeteria time a pleasant experience can make everything that much easier. When you put the thought into making your unique cafeteria experience, you can make that thought process permeate through the entire school. Whatever you do, showing that you consider the little things will go a long way to showing your students that you care.
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