The Wall Street Journal had a fun article on school lunches, and how parents cope with the rules different schools have.  Several of the rules will resonate for Montessori House families whose children pack a lunch for school.   Some of our rules include:

• No nuts — no ground nuts (e.g. peanuts) or tree nuts (e.g. walnuts, pecans, filberts, almonds, etc. )
• No drinks (including drinkable yogurts)
• No sweetened foods (no candy, cookies, cakes, fruit roll-ups, etc. )
• We can reheat food (in a microwave), but do not cook food or thaw frozen food (in other words we microwave for no more than 1 minute).

We do take issue with the reporter’s endorsement of lunchboxes that come with many components — “bento-style” lunch “systems”).  We’ve found that these lunch “systems” simply occupy too much space.  Normally we have four (4) children  at a table for lunch, but when a child has an expansive “system” of boxes, etc. they require twice as much space, so at a table for four we can fit only 2 normal lunchboxes plus one lunch “system”, or only two children with such a lunch “system”.  Consequently we recommend parents stick with a regular lunch box or bag that requires a normal amount of table-top space.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 24th, 2013 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Parent Memos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.