20+ Quick and Easy Homeschool Lunch Ideas

These quick and easy homeschool lunch ideas will have you feeding the family in no time at all! Fast, simple, and delicious!

During the homeschool day, the last thing you want to have to think about is food. Ideally, you’d have a day designated during the week to whip up some ready-made meal items to eat during the lunch week. Unfortunately, not many things in life are ideal.

So, to that end, let’s talk about some homeschool lunch ideas that will hopefully save you time and sanity so you can focus on the fun stuff- like math. Joking! We all know math is about as fun as a trip to the dentist.

But seriously, let’s dive and hash out a plan for keeping our children fed with as little work as possible. Before we jump into the actual lunch ideas, we’re going to discuss a few tricks for keeping everyone on board, dealing with picky eaters, and NOT over-complicating things.

Grab the free printable meal planner pages at the end of this post!

Involve the Kids

Like most moms, you probably have grand plans of feeding your children beautiful plates filled with multicolored veggies, homemade whole wheat bread, and nary an ounce of sugar to be found. Your plans are great!

The problem is, they’re your plans. Just like big people, little people like to have a say in what they eat. Involve the kids in meal planning and shopping.

When they help make the meal plan, they’re more likely to want to help meal prep and just eat their food in general.

Prepping ahead

To save time during the school week, do a little prep ahead of time. Examples of this might be to cook a big batch of taco meat on the weekend for tacos, burritos, salads, or soups during the week.

Cooked chicken is great for a quick pasta, salads, sandwiches, and soups. You can do the same thing with beans.

Set the crockpot in the early morning and this will often have lunch ready by midday. Have a freezer cooking day over the weekend and this will also yield many lunch options to pull out and heat up as needed. Think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, meat and cheese sandwiches, burritos, bagel sandwiches, egg muffins, sloppy joe corn muffins.

Don’t underestimate leftovers

Leftovers are quite possibly the quickest, easiest lunch you can have. Just heat (or not!) and eat. To make sure you always have some on hand, make your dinner meals a bit larger. You don’t have to double per se (unless you want to).

Adding an extra cup or two of rice, an extra can of beans, a few more potatoes, or any other stretcher will always yield more food.

If you do decide to make extra dinner to save for later, set it aside before you feed the family. If you leave it with the rest of the meal, it’s likely to get eaten then and there.

Homeschool lunch ideas

• homemade hummus with veggies
• cheese, crackers, and fruit
• quesadillas – plain cheese, cold cuts, pepperoni, or veggie additions are all great choices to change things up!
• corn dogs – again, homemade or store-bought
• pizzas – pizza boats, bagel pizzas, tortilla pizzas, zucchini pizzas, or regular pizzas
• roll-ups – lunch meat and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter with banana and honey, tuna salad, egg salad
• muffins/bread and smoothies
• tuna salad or tuna patties
• egg salad
• nachos – these can be just chips and cheese or be topped with some warmed chili beans, taco meat, and/or anything else you like on nachos
• hot subs or paninis
• baked potatoes – plain, BLT, taco, sweet potatoes . . . the topping choices for baked potatoes are only limited by your imagination (or Googling abilities)
• hard-boiled eggs
• bagel sandwiches, or just bagels with cream cheese – remember, you don’t have to be fancy, you just have to get them full
• grilled cheese – plain cheese or add pepperoni or lunch meat to change things up
• lettuce wraps – anything you can put on bread, you can put on lettuce
• macaroni and cheese – whether you do the 33 cent box at Aldi or choose to make it from scratch, mac and cheese is always a winner
• hotdogs or brats
• salad – you can top a salad with just about anything to make it more filling
• pasta salad or potato salad
• leftover breakfast – make extra waffles, pancakes, breakfast sandwiches, egg muffins, regular muffins, or sausage gravy for breakfast and just reheat it for lunch
• soup – homemade is great (and super frugal!)

There you have it, 20 different homeschool lunch ideas to get your brood fed quickly and easily.

Download these printable meal planner pages to make meal planning for your homeschool family a little easier and hopefully mealtimes will be less stressful with a plan in place. Fill out the form below to get access to the meal planning pages.