The Thing About Lunch Count

I always think that, as parents, you must wonder what goes on inside of our four walls when you drop off your kids off in the mornings. Here is a tiny glimpse at one extra special part of our day. Lunch count. Ahhh lunch count.

When you're five (or six), making a lunch choice is a huge ordeal. And it's super important to find out what the person next to you will be choosing before you make your selection.

Every day we have five choices for the kids to pick from if they don't bring a lunch from home. I'm just gonna go ahead and throw this out there. Five lunch choices are too many for kindergarteners.

After the morning announcements and the pledges, I will read all five lunch choices. And to make matters worse, the menu writers really tried to get clever when they named the food. So I spent several minutes each morning fumbling to explain what a Minnie Mouse Salad or Pepe Le Pew Pizza is.

Then I'll say something like, "Okay- I'm going to read the choices one more time. You need to listen carefully. Pick one and stick it in your brain until I say your name. Then tell me what you want."

The fact of the matter is, as I go down our class roster I have about a 20% chance of getting a valid lunch choice from any one person. It typically goes like this:

"M, what do you want for lunch today?"
"Ummm.... yogurt and grilled cheese."
"No. That wasn't one of the choices."
"Ummm... but I just wanted yogurt and grilled cheese."
"You can't have that today. Do you want a hot dog?"
"Ummm... I don't know."
"Do you want spaghetti?"
"This one time I eated pasketti at my grandma's house with my cousin."

And so on and so on for 21 different kids. Lunch count is highly entertaining (if you're not the one trying to get the actual lunch count) in room C106 to say the least!

Here's the other thing about lunch count. In the world of education, the lunch count paper is a fairly important document. For starters, it takes a good while to actually get everyone's lunch choice. For another, the cafeteria ladies are always wanting it first thing so they can start cooking, and if you don't turn it in in a timely manner you start getting a bunch of emails.

The second week of school I was feeling pretty confident with my student's abilities. As a class, they had gone with me five different times to turn in our morning lunch count. So on this particular day, I asked the helper of the day to choose a friend, walk right down the hall, find Mrs. Julie in the cafeteria and hand her this piece of paper.

When they came back to class I was busy working with a group, and it didn't dawn on me to actually follow up with them. About 30 minutes later I asked our helper if he handed the lunch count to Mrs. Julie.

He scratched his curls, scrunched up his nose and pointed at the other boy. "Weuh (well). Me and him didn't see no adults. So we just laid it on a table in that room."

NOOOOO. I eventually found our precious lunch count paper in a trash can in the cafeteria.

Lesson 1A: Never assume ANYTHING with five year olds.