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Grades 1-3: Eat at your assigned seat place with good table manners, and the teacher at the head of the table. 20 minutes enforced sitting at the table, even if you finished earlier. (So that no one hurries their lunch to get the best swing at post lunch play time.) And do finish that food! No leaving the lunch room without finishing your plate! No food choices either. You ate what was served, at the prescribed portion size.
Grades 4-6: Again, assigned seating, but with two teachers supervising the whole room rather than one for each class. A little less surveillance means you can try to hide some of the uneaten food in the potted plants next to the tables. And get told off for the same. Again, 20 minutes before you can leave the lunch room. And some days you have to help wash the dishes.
Grades 7-9: Food lunch is served free of charge to all, but you no longer have to eat it. You may bring lunch, go home to eat, choose your own portion size, etc. No more assigned seating, no more enforced time in the lunch room. But by then, kids were no longer in a hurry to leave.
High School: Our town was cutting back on school lunch expenses, and lunch was only half paid for. Eat or not, where you want, you are on your own.
That said, I probably could've used some manners enforcement. My first civilized boyfriend had to teach me to properly hold a fork in my teens. I'm still uncomfortable in nice restaurants. Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes
Today children get milk and fruit (free for all) to go with their packed lunch.
Lunch is often consumed outside, and I don't think teachers bother about manners. Norwegians generally don't have manners, so teachers would have to be trained themselves before they could teach.
Swedes are so much more polite than Norwegians - now I understand why:-)
Less than 10% of primary schools in Wales are offering their pupils a free breakfast, a year after the scheme was introduced by the assembly government. Figures show 148 out of a possible 1,588 primaries will offer their pupils a free breakfast by the end of the autumn term
Figures show 148 out of a possible 1,588 primaries will offer their pupils a free breakfast by the end of the autumn term
Haven't found more recent information although an evaluation of this scheme is being done.
I do wish that schools wouldn't make children drink milk though.
Also, it provides an opportunity for branding and marketing of milk producers in a school environment that's so desperately underprovided in that department, compared to the rest of society.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
In Switzerland there was no school lunch, we always went home for lunch and then back to school. I think this is still the same way. If the mother works the kids might eat with some relatives or what we call a "Tagesmutter" (daymother) often the mother of another kid in school. The bigger ones might probably migth bring their lunch and eat it with some friends - but I am a little out of the loop, so am not quite sure how it is handled today.
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