Healthy Lunches

At Otonga School, we promote a healthy lifestyle to our community – students, staff, and families – as part of our commitment to a safe and inclusive school environment and to the National Administration Guidelines. Educating students about nutrition and encouraging healthy active learning contributes to their personal success and wellbeing, and to a healthier community for everyone. We have adapted how we spend our time during learning, morning tea and lunchtime.The benefits of this is to ensure all students are supervised by their teachers while eating. It ensures that children are sitting down while enjoying healthy food safely and not rushing off to go to schoolwide play. It is also a great opportunity for teachers to eat kai with their children, read a book while doing so and support education around healthy food and water. Teachers and students can also ensure litter is placed in bins, and wrappers are put back in lunchboxes after eating. We encourage litterless lunches. Crunch and Sip is a set time during the school day for students to eat vegetables, fruit and other healthy snacks as well as drink water in the classroom. The Crunch and Sip break is not designed to replace morning tea and lunchtime and occurs within learning time. Students bring vegetables and/or fruit and a drink bottle to school each day for the Crunch and Sip break. Giving students the chance to re-fuel in class with fruit, vegetables and other healthy snacks helps to improve physical and mental performance and concentration, as well as promoting long term health. Each Ako will decide on how this works within their teams according to the age and stage of their tamariki. For the younger students, it may be a routine that is established, but for the older ones, it will eventually just become part of the learning after routines are set. We would encourage you to please work with your children to explore some healthy options for this snack time. It does make it easier to bring these already cut up and in a little separate container. Each day, try to pack lunch, a healthy snack, extra fruit and veggies and water. There is no one size fits all. We encourage you to do the best for your child. Information about healthy lunchboxes here