Wednesday 19 September 2012

How does lunch time work?

We thought we should share how lunchtime works at our school. We go to the playground at 11:00, and when we get back at 11:30 we have our lunchtime (we are SO hungry by then!). We have lunch in our classroom, so we come in from the playground, we line up to wash our hands then we go to our cubbies to get our lunch boxes. We then choose where we want to sit and we set our place. We are encouraged to have the main meal first, then dessert, because it can be hard to eat the main meal after the sweetness of the dessert! If someone didn’t bring a drink we do have a water fountain in the classroom. After lunch we clean up our spot and we can rest a bit, looking at a book while our friends finish their lunch.

Today’s lunches are from Max, Marco, and Sophia Ann


Max’s mother explained that she uses a special lunch box for his lunch, from a company called laptop lunches. She alternates what is in the lunch box daily, but there is usually a salad and either a sandwich or cheese & crackers. In addition there is always some fruit and occasionally a yogurt. Today, as you can see, he had fruit (blueberries, strawberries and raspberries), carrot sticks and the little pot with salad dressing (Max really likes homemade salad dressing!), a hard-boiled egg and a Petit Ecolier cookie. Max also has an organic chocolate milk.


Marcos’s lunch is called Onigiri (rice ball); it is rice, seaweed, fish flakes and seasoning. It is a traditional Japanese snack or “brown bag” lunch or picnic food. All Japanese children eat Onigiri, Marco’s father told us – and Marco clearly likes it! Many Onigiri have something in the middle – salmon, kelp, tuna, pickled plum, etc… Marco also has Cheerios (a brand of cereal), green beans and a cookie.


Sophia’s lunch. Today she has salmon patties from a green market near her house. She goes with her mother to buy salmon there. Her mother told us that, as she is Canadian, she marinates the salmon in soy sauce and maple syrup and then they bake the fish and mix it with breadcrumbs and seasoning to make the patties. What makes this lunch really unique is that from beginning to end, it is made by Sophia and her mother, together. Sophia also has carrots, crackers and a yogurt.
Food-o-meter: 10/10
Bites: unknown
Eating with the mouth closed: we did great!
Speaking with the mouth full: we need to work on this some more!
Food dropped or spilled on the floor: getting there…
Tomorrow we will see the lunches from four other classmates! See you tomorrow!

10 comments:

  1. These lunches this week look so tasty and are giving my daughter (age 9.5) some great ideas for her lunches. She usually takes cold by choice since shes not a fan of the lunch menu at school.
    I'm wondering tho, are the children allowed to warm up any parts of their lunches, or do they eat them cold..or warm from a thermos?

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    1. We don't have how to warm the lunches at school so they bring inside thermos.

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  2. I just love the the children have decorated their table with place mats and napkins.

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  3. I confess, I'm having just as much fun looking at the delightful "lunch boxes" as the food! :)

    When I was a kid and packed a lunch, sandwiches were always wrapped in waxed paper ("Baggies" first came out when I was about 14 years old), and lunch was carried to school in a brown-paper bag. So fruit was always an apple or pear or something else that was whole and didn't require peeling. Sometimes I took carrot sticks, but they often came unwrapped from their wax paper bundle before lunch time. We certainly could not have managed to take Eduardo’s Tortilla Espanola, Julien's penne in tomato sauce, or Ryogo’s lunch.

    Nothing came in little plastic individual containers then. Things were either sold in aluminum cans or glass jars. So no individual pots of yogurt, or cartons/bottles of milk.

    The school-bus kids that took their lunch every day while I was in elementary/primary school were given half-pint glass bottles of milk. (The rest of us walked home for lunch on all but the very coldest days, and -- on those days -- we went without milk with lunch.) By the time I got into "middle school" schools were able to buy half-pint cartons of milk and those were sold to students, either as part of the school "hot lunch" program, or available individually for kids who packed their lunch from home.

    I don't suppose it really affects the taste but, since we do eat with our eyes as well as our mouths, looking at all of the attractive methods the children use to bring their lunches to school is almost as interesting to me as what they bring!

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  4. Guess from the health standpoint the meals today are okayish.. not too good, but not really bad either.

    I just couldn't help to wonder, what the opposite of "organic chocolate milk" would be, but that's just because I'm not a native english speaker, for whom "organic" is a word coming from chemistry in which it is the opposite of "inorganic". So the inanimate (the "inorganic" materials) and the living world (the "organic" materials) are opposites, but milk - be it organic or non-organic ^^ - would always have to be considered organic, even if it's non-organic.
    In Germany that chocolate milk would be called "Bio Chocolate Milk" - which is about as stupid as calling it organic or non-organic, because of course milk is biologic in nature ^^ - because it was made using only ingredients coming from ecological farming.

    Nonetheless it is a better chocolate milk than the ordinary non-organic products ;)

    MaikD

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    1. Hi MaikD,

      Calling it "organic" is a legally controlled term here in the US. It refers to the methods of farming used in producing the food. (For instance, for fruits and vegetables, no synthetic pesticides can be used in growing them.)
      For milk it means that the cows have only eaten "organic" food, and haven't been treated with synthetic hormones or certain other medications.

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    2. Yeah, wikipedia had told me that already before I wrote my last post ^^
      I just tried to exlain why I think that using the label "organic" (or "bio(logical)" as we do label it here in Germany) is funny. For me, at least.

      MaikD

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  5. Also, I was wondering....

    Since the kids in JAM are in kindergarten, are light snacks provided during the morning and/or afternoon?

    I do remember that, when my own children were that age, they often had a hard time with eating only three meals per day. I guess their little tummies weren't big enough to hold enough food to last them that long between meals, so they seemed to do better with light meals and then something healthy (like fruit, etc) as a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack.

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    1. School offers a snack for the children once a day. They have juice with either a fruit or vegetable for snack.

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  6. Todo tiene una pinta estupenda, pero... ¿son cuadros?, parece pintura. Con estas comidas las arterias pueden ser de plástico.
    salud.

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