Practicing School Lunch for Kids
This page may contain affiliate links. Learn More.
Practicing school lunch at home for kids is a necessary skill! Help your child gain confidence and independence by teaching them how to open and eat their lunch box meal.
While it might not have occurred to you to have your child practice eating lunch, this is one skill set that is often neglected as children prepare to go off to school.
Opening lunch boxes, packaging, and even peeling a banana are very important skills for school age children.
In fact, as a former pre-k and kindergarten teacher I consider it one of the top 10 essential skill for kindergarten readiness!
I’ll add that even though we are homeschooling nowadays, my kids still have lunch boxes and I took the time to teach them how to eat out of a lunchbox without help. We practiced at home before we were using lunch boxes out of the house!
We pack lunches for field trips, hikes, park dates, and road trips and it’s important to me that my kids are able to eat their lunch independently.
Eating Lunch at School for Kids: An Essential Skill
Why are Lunch Skills So Important?
It’s tempting to overlook this as an unnecessary thing to practice with your child, however, I find it is crucial to their success in school for two reasons.
1. School Lunch is Often Limited for Kids
In our school (as with most schools) we only had 25 minutes to open, eat, and clean up from lunch before hustling to the next class or outside for recess.
That is NOT a lot of time if your child is having to wait for the teacher to open their food. With 20-30 kids per teacher, and each child having 3-5 items to open, it might be 5 or even 10 minutes before your child can even start eating!
In my opinion that is simply too long for a small child to wait, and way too fast to expect them to have to eat before leaving the lunch room!
Same thing goes for us now that we are homeschooling… if all of my kids had to wait for me to get their lunches open, it would take a lot longer for some of them to start eating! Everyone being able to open their own lunch box means we all start and finish eating around the same time.
2. Life skills give kids confidence!
Being able to do something yourself builds confidence. Confidence overflows into every aspect of a child’s development!
While there is nothing wrong with asking for help in the right circumstances, the pride of learning how to do something on their own will follow your child for many years to come.
Aside from learning letters and numbers, learning to master their lunch box is one of the first skills I tried to teach my pre-k and kindergarten students.
Not every teacher has the opportunity or desire to teach their class this important skill, so help your child by practicing lunch box skills a few times over the summer or on the weekends!
Again, fast forward to me as a homeschool mom – I want my kids to be confident doing things independently. I love spending time with them, teaching them, and being with them, but I also have a job, chores, personal interests, and a brief-but-vital-to-my-sanity fitness routine. For homeschooling to keep working for us, they have to do some things independently!
How To Practice School Lunch at Home:
The simplest way to do this is:
- Pack up a lunch for your child at home.
- Have them open and eat their lunch. Take note of what’s challenging to them and offer guidance.
Basically, pack a meal that you would actually send your child to school with!
Prepare the lunch ahead of time (that morning) so that it is in the lunch box and ready to go at lunch time. Tell your child about the lunch box beforehand so they can get excited about the idea! My daughter was over the moon excited about doing this.
At lunch time, pull out the lunch box and watch your child to see how they can manage. I taught my daughter to take the water bottle out of her lunch box first. 
If they get stuck, start by offering suggestions.
Don’t jump in right away – give them a chance to try things on their own.
Verbally guide them through opening all their food, how to eat neatly, and how to clean up when they are finished. If they really can’t do something, evaluate how necessary that is for their lunchbox!
Remember that you don’t want them to be frustrated, so if they ask for help after trying, give it.
Juice boxes can be one of the trickiest! To be honest, we just stick with water.
I have found that over time, we simplified sack lunch and actually saved money going with a high-quality stainless steel bento style lunch box and using stainless steel and silicone containers.
My absolute favorite lunchbox purchase over the years has been the Rover by PlanetBox. They are third-party certified lead-free, and there is no plastic anywhere!
It can go in the dishwasher every day and still looks brand new! Even when we aren’t doing field trip lunches, my kids are obsessed with assembling lunch in their Rovers.
How does a kinda splurgey lunchbox save us money? No more zippered plastic baggies. No more replacing plastic food storage containers that were cracking after a couple of months of use. These lunchboxes don’t have elements that wear out. No paint or coating and no plastic anywhere – just durable stainless steel!
Planetbox lunchboxes are a long-term lunch solution and I wish all three kids had started with these! Since we pack them for longer days and live where it is warm, we added insulated lunch bags which have a sleeve for an ice pack.
Additional Ideas for Practicing Independent Lunch Skills
In addition to simply learning how to eat and clean up from lunch, it’s also a fun idea to let your child learn to make their own lunch!
This $10 set of food cutters has provided some seriously fun ways for the kids to make lunch, and the bento style lunch boxes showcase the adorable little cut out foods!
Make a list of simple to make items (sandwiches, crackers, chips, fruit/cheese, deli meats, and so on…) that they can practice gathering and putting together. Then work your way through the list over a period of time (several weeks) helping them learn a new meal from time to time.
This is also a good time to talk about a balanced meal.
Encourage fruit, vegetable, & protein in every lunch! Another reason I love the Rover lunchbox is it has a perfect-sized compartment for a single, small treat, reinforcing that treats should usually be the smallest part of every meal!
Make sure that they have several opportunities to practice at least opening their lunch box and food items. This will help them so much as they transition from home to school!
Bet You a Marble That You’ll Also Like These Ideas:
Pin This For Later
This is such a great idea! My son is doing Kindergarten at home this year, but will probably be going to school next year. This will also make lunch time at home easier because I can pack it all up the night before! Thank you for this post and ideas.
I would love a printable copy of this to share with my pre-k parents that are sending their child to kindergarten next fall. It is a great information to help transition them into kindergarten.
That’s a great idea Pam! I will do that shortly!