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Lunchbox genius – eat and read

It’s easy to build a daily reading moment for your lunchbox toting K-3 learner.   Knowing your child’s comfort level in vocabulary, you easily use that knowledge to compose a quick, encouraging lunchbox note.   It’s a welcome and increasingly popular gesture from parents to young learners.   It provides an active application of new and growing reading skills and, just as importantly, it provides a loving connection to your child in a busy school day. 

Get colorful lunchbox notes for free

Quick, web-based, free downloads of cute lunchbox notes are available.  Some lunchbox notes sport Disney characters, others have jokes, some have editable notes to help note-challenged parents, and some are simply cute and winsome. 

  1.  Free Disney notes are available with colorful favorites such as the Little Mermaid, the Princesses, Mickey Mouse, Wall-E, Jiminy Cricket, Dumbo, and others. 
  2. Free Lunchbox Joke notes are available for quick print-cut-laugh options.   These are more like small slips (think big fortune cookie memo) offered on a PDF sheet that you print and cut.
  3. Editable lunchbox notes provide the ease of being able to adapt or delete and rewrite messages on pre-printed notes. 
  4. A medley of cute, lunchbox notes – some already with sayings and others with open spaces – let you mix it up. 
  5. Sticker notes that can be attached to a fruit via a rubber band or printed on sticker paper to adhere to a sandwich bag provide a cute option. 
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Simple touch is a savvy learning opportunity

Academics can make reading seem like an abstract, worksheet skill to some learners.   Lunchbox notes are a quick strategy to bring reading back into the real world.  They’re smart and fun, and lunchbox notes highlight the exciting communication power of words and images. 

Lunchbox notes packed into kids’ lunchboxes are healthy integrations of words into our everyday lives. The National Writing Project, with over 200 university-based project sites that span all 50 states, informs us that “We are all writers.”  Appreciating the power of words is a basic building block of successful learning. 

Quick encouragement and connection

Lunchbox notes are delightful fun for young learners.   And, on days that parents find themselves too busy to print-cut-write, there’s always time to scrawl a note on a banana, the sandwich bag, or on a napkin.   And, if you’re out of words, just use a quote from a poem, song, or nursery rhyme, a line from a favorite story book, or words from a famous person or television character.   

It’s the connection and your child’s smile that matters, and your personal touch, communication, and encouragement in a lunchbox note, whatever form it takes, is sure to bring a grin. 

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, Education Examiner

Florence McGinn is retired vice president of GKE (Global Knowledge Exchange) and served as a United States commissioner on Web-based Education. She is a United States National Tech&Learning Teacher of the Year and a Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Educator. She has extensive...

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