Nude food lunches

This strategy to raise awareness about the use (or over use) of plastic in our environment has really taken hold across our school. It's fantastic to see.

The initiative has grown from having nude food picnics once per term with the whole school gathering on the oval to encouraging nude food lunch boxes weekly to now making Monday and Tuesday officially nude food days. The spill over to the other days of the week has been great to see. (These photos were taken on a Friday!)

The lunch boxes take many forms as parents figure out how to pack food without single use practice. There are inventive ways of keeping lunches cool, amazing stainless steel containers looking like modern day tiffin tins, plastic boxes with lids and small suitcase varieties with cute dividers.

One of the best things has been that these nude lunches are much healthier - gone are the chip packets and muesli bar wrappers having been replaced with cut fruit, baby tomatoes and cucumbers, crackers and cubes of cheese, buns and plastic free sandwiches. There's less cling wrap and more bees wax wraps.

I love that kids are pushing this initiative along themselves. They understand already how important it is for us to create less waste. I'm sure it won't be long before we can dispense with reminders and nude food celebrations and it just becomes part of our automatic practice.

'OMG - she said NAKED!'

What is it about certain words and their ability to create paroxysms of laughter in kids?  The usual sections of our vocabulary that achieve this are to do with certain body parts and most often to do with bodily functions. But a few weeks ago just before our Preps started their swimming lessons, classes were reduced to chaos because the teacher said, God forbid, 'UNDIES!'

Not just as baldly as that, of course, - it was in the context of naming all their clothes before Friday but the very word 'undies' and the fact the teacher was saying it was enough to produce screams of laughter from some and shocked hands-over-mouth actions from others. One Prep teacher told me several members of her class kept looking at the classroom door as if the language police were about the descend and haul the teacher away to be reprimanded!

And then, of course, last week we had Nude Food Day.  When one of our Student Leaders did a skit on stage at Assembly a few weeks ago to promote the event, he said the word 'nude' about six times. 730 kids were either aghast, collapsing with laughter or looking like they couldn't believe their ears! (Actually, that's an exaggeration - there weren't 730 - one class was at art and a couple at swimming lessons.)

Nude Food Day was a hit - nearly every child got into the swing of bringing a rubbish free lunch box to school. But despite the tag name for this new movement in our community being well known and documented, and a commonplace practice in some other schools that our children have come from, some kids could not get past that you could say 'nude' at school, and what's more, the teachers, upright citizens in our community, kept saying it!

Image courtesy of http://www.nudefoodday.com.au/gallery.php

After morning tea, I went around to most classes to see how rubbish free lunch boxes had been. The kids were excited that there had been no rubbish in the playground (actually the teachers were more excited about this, and our cleaners more excited again!) and they all told me that they thought we should do it every day (especially as most of them were sporting big stickers for their efforts!)

I stuck my head in the window of one classroom and said 'So, how naked were your lunches today?' You should have seen their faces - 'Oh my God, she said NAKED!' And they were off again. (The class teacher wanted to kill me!)

You have to love our kids. In other schools it takes really socially inappropriate language and references to raise such mirth. But not ours - you only have to mention undies and suggest rubbish free lunches to pull off a laugh that would be coveted by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.