|
Breakfast in the Classroom is simple and easy and the best way to bring the benefits of school breakfast to all the students. Once you bring the food to the kids, just about every child eats.
When combined with Provisions 2/3, all children eat free. And with breakfast the most important health and learning meal of the day, classroom breakfast is a winner for the students, their families, their teachers and the whole school.
|
|
|
|
|
How Does Classroom Breakfast Work?
The simplicity of classroom breakfast is the key to its success. All children are offered a breakfast, usually at no charge, at their desk at the start of the school day. Selected students bring the meal on the familiar little red wagons up from the cafeteria to the classroom. Students select their meal and take it to their desks, or are served where they are sitting, and quickly eat the meal.
While the students are eating, the teacher takes roll, delivers daily announcements, uses the breakfast items as the focus for a short nutrition education lesson, or reads a poem or story. Or the students are free to complete their homework or work on exercises or chat with each other. Everyone helps with a quick clean up, the trash goes outside the classroom door, and the untouched food is returned to the cafeteria. After a few weeks, students develop routines and classroom eating manners, leaving no garbage or stains. And, each morning, within 10-15 minutes, all the students are fed a healthy breakfast, and the class is really ready to learn.
What’s For Breakfast?
Meals are usually delivered on carts. Milk and orange juice come in coolers, hot items come in insulated bags, along with a choice of other breakfast items. Schools decide the menu, and choices include fruit in child-friendly sizes, cereal, muffins, bagels, breakfast pizza, yogurt, breakfast sandwich, French toast sticks, and more. Simplicity is key.
Who Benefits?
First and foremost, all the students benefit. Some students are still hungry when they get to school – no time to eat at home, long commutes, only unhealthy foods earlier in the morning – and, without a good breakfast they would be unlikely to concentrate and work with enough energy to focus and take advantage of the school day. Some children will overeat later in the day, on unhealthy foods, if they don’t eat enough healthy food in the morning. Every one benefits from the change in the classroom atmosphere when all the students are nutritiously fed and ready to learn.
Where is it happening?
Classroom Breakfast is most popular in elementary schools where the students most often stay in their homeroom. But special classes do well with classroom breakfast, and some secondary schools are happy with this model, too. Successful classroom breakfast programs are running at Cutler-Orisi, Folsom-Cordova, Modesto, Hawthorne, and in other district around California and in other states, as well. State-funded breakfast expansion grants are available to fund many of the equipment costs associated with initiating classroom breakfast.
Handouts For More Information
|
|
|
