Voigt Elementary School The Voigt Opportunity Cafe (V.O.C.) began serving our generous staff members on October 30, 2015, with the goal of giving FAC students valuable, real-life learning opportunities both in the school as well as the community at large.
Running the cafe permeates our math curriculum. We have a different job that must be performed every day. Mondays, we edit our order form to be sure it reflects the correct inventory and date before emailing it to staff. The students then use the data collected from the order forms to organize the items needed such as cups, K pods, lids, and pastries. On Thursdays, bags are assembled and labeled with individual orders. This helps to streamline preparation and delivery on Friday mornings. Math skills we are all practicing are 1:1 correspondence, counting, adding, subtracting, graph interpretation, money counting, and money handling including participating in the counting of our sales and filling out deposit slips. However, we are gaining skills in many more areas such as social skills, customer service, food handling and hygiene/hand washing.
TAG students and Mrs. Stockton have helped market our business through letter writing and making posters.TAG students are also present on Friday mornings during preparation and deliveries to be our photojournalists. This is allowing us to chronicle our experience, use the photos as a reflection piece and share our adventure with others.
We are seeing benefits we could not have imagined, such as increased visibility of our special needs students in the general population and more our reticent students learning to speak up and be visible. Our students love the VOC and look forward to serving our staff each week. It is pure joy to see them so filled with confidence.
Proceeds from the V.O.C. are used to replenish our inventory as well as fund community field trips to practice our new skills.