Tips for Organizing Kids Lunches
So you’ve probably got some ideas of what to make your kiddos for their lunch boxes this year (and if not don’t worry I’ve got a half dozen posts with hundreds of ideas I can share too)… but what about actually getting them built every single day? You need a system! So check out my life-saving (or at least sanity saving) tips for organizing kids’ lunches.
**This post has some affiliate links of course to the organization thigns that have helped streamline this process for me! You can read the ol’ boring disclosure if you feel like it.**
Amazing Lunch Box Ideas To Try Now!
Packing that school lunch can feel tough for everyone even two weeks into the school year. Sure, you can pack a sandwich and throw in some chips or goldfish and a brownie. But like Mini Wheat’s keeps telling us on their commercials, keep them full, keep them focused! (Even if it’s just a marketing ploy to get you serving up boxed stuff instead of meat and eggs, it’s STILL good advice! And cereal some days is cereal-ously a lifesaver!)
So to start off on the right foot… I’m going to give you a TON of lunch box ideas. Enough for the whole year. Because once that is out of the way and saved in your “back to school lunch ideas” Pinterest board… then all you have to worry about is how to set up a seamless system for each morning or even night before.
So I’ve done the digging for you! You don’t have to troll Google or Pinterest any more for gobs of viral school lunch ideas, they’re all here! But If you want even more ideas I have a whole board on my account dedicated to healthy lunches you might want to check out. It’s right here.
- Simple + Healthy School Lunch Ideas
- Easy + Healthy + Cheap School Lunch Ideas
- School Lunch Ideas for the Entire Year
- 100 Creative School Lunch Ideas
- B2S School Lunch Ideas
Now onto the million dollar questions… how can I quickly and easily keep my school lunch building organized so that I don’t want to rip my hair out 3 days into the school year?
RELATED: Cheap Healthy After School Snack Ideas
How to make school lunches faster
There are lots of tricks and tips that I’ve found through the years that can make putting together school lunches so much easier, faster, and even more enjoyable!
- Get the kids involved in the shopping process. When kids have more of a say on what they eat (well on anything really) within a reasonable amount, they are more likely to eat it!
- Let the kids help pack lunches. You don’t always have to go it alone mama. Just like tip #1, if they help put that lunch together, it’s a lot more likely it gets eaten! That doesn’t mean give the kids free range of the meal. But you can give them options like, which fruit would you like? Or, which cracker do you want today?
- Get organized with your lunch prep! If you don’thave convenient and logic organization for lunch prep you’ll repeatedly go to the same place to get “one more thing.” After opening the fridge 7 different times to pack one set of lunches, I knew I needed something better.
How can I keep my school lunches organized?
Pick up the #1 BESTSELLING bento box set from Amazon right now! You get 15 boxes ridiculously cheap to make packing all these awesome healthy lunch ideas a breeze!
Having these on handmakes school lunches, work lunches, and meal prep so much easier! This affordable set has enough boxes for the whole family!
But my biggest grip is they are disposable… and I’m a super huge “reuse and repurpose every single thing semi-crunchy” kinda gal. So I actually DO reuse these… but if you want something more durable that you can pop in the dishwasher consider getting each of the kids a bento box lunch box like these.
How to Get Your Lunchbox Prep Really Organized… and Fast
Now that you have meal ideas and the lunch box that alls nice and divided to shove the stuff into, let’s get into how to organize your kitchen and pantry for smooth mornings that might even make you (dare I say it) love the school lunch process because of how easy it is now!
Here are a few simple but life-changing tools that I use to organize my kitchen, pantry, and overall lunchbox making process.
1. Add color-coded bins to your pantry
When attempting to involve the kids in lunch packing (which realistically doesn’t happen every single day, but when it does it’s always nice) it is WAY easier to say, “Ok, now go pick a snack from the green bin.” than it is just pointing them toward the shelf.
By having colored bins set up for different types of snacks it’s very easy for kids, AND FOR YOU, to go grab a snack cracker or fruit from it’s designated bin. (We also use them in the fridge for a bit more organization.)
2. While we’re at it, you can color-code your kids’ lunch boxes.
There are a lot of really nice and affordable BPA free bento-style lunchboxes available on amazon. I like having color-coded lunchboxes for the kiddos for two reasons.
- It makes for a lot less confusion when you hit that rushed time of the morning and I can just holler out, “Jade grab the green box!”
- Once again, giving kids options makes them feel happy, involved, and important. So the days they are helping they get to pick their lid color.
3. Organize the rest of your pantry in clear plastic containers.
I like having my pantry crazy organized. We go through a lot of food in my house, and when I say a lot I’m sure if you saw the amount of food the 5 of us alone purchase and consume every month you’d be astounded! Especially because I have 3 young girls… no teen boys here!
With all that food quickly coming in and out everything needs to have a place or it gets lost in the shuffle. Behind my color-coded bins of snacks that the kids can pick, there are clear plastic bins that hold the staples in an easy to see and access place.
Having an organized pantry makes the whole cooking and preparation process exponentially easier.
Wrapping Up How To Organize Kids Lunch Boxes
First– pick up some Bento-style lunch boxes for everyone.
Second, have a lot of recipe ideas on hand (check out my Pinterest board devoted to that if you feel stuck and make your own and save all the ideas from mine you like! Anything to give a mama a leg up on the school year!)
Third, start setting up your life so that the kids can be semi-involved in the lunch packing process. Either by letting them help add things to the list, taking them shopping, using color coded bins so that you can tell them to pick “one from the blue bin and one from the purple” each morning… etc.
Lastly, invest in some bins that help you organize your fridge and pantry. I can’t emphasize enough how much organizing those places with bins will help! Think, big tall clear bins in the back, color coded bins in front. You can pick them up fof Amazon, at Target or Walmart, or even at the Dollar Tree!
