6 Secrets to a Successful Lunch Bunch
There are more classroom management strategies than there are students in your classroom. Choosing which one will work best for you with your particular students can be overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be.
The best approach to behavior management is to be positive and proactive.
Build a positive classroom environment in which students feel safe and know they can trust you. This is the most effective way to avoid behavior issues before they arise.
You can connect with your students personally in a number of ways. I found holding a regular Lunch Bunch to be one of the most effective. Setting up and managing a Lunch Bunch is simple. Take a little time to put structure around it and get ready to enjoy some special times with your students.
What Is Lunch Bunch?
Lunch Bunch is simply having lunch with a small group of students away from their usual lunch place. For teachers, it’s an important time to learn about your students. And for students? It’s an opportunity to feel seen and heard.
Before starting a lunch bunch, determine your purpose. Many teachers host Lunch Bunch only as a reward for meeting individual goals, such as earning a certain number of AR points or scoring a certain grade on a test. I recommend against this approach.
No matter the goal, there will always be students who don’t meet it. These students - the ones most in need of being seen - will feel even more marginalized. These are the students it’s most important for you to connect with.
Make your Lunch Bunch for everyone - not just “winners.”
Why should you host a Lunch Bunch?
There are many options for how and why to put Lunch Bunch in place in your classroom.
Connecting with students who are struggling.
Celebrating the achievement of a class milestone.
Rewarding students who were exceptionally well behaved for a substitute.
No matter how you manage a Lunch Bunch or how often you host it, just do it!
Students absolutely love it and you’ll soon find yourself looking forward to it as much as they do.
Lunch Bunch gives you the opportunity to learn all kinds of things about your students - things you’d never learn while going about a regular school day.
And your students will get to know things about you - like how spending time building relationships with them is more important to you than having 20 minutes of peace and quiet.
Relax and have fun with your students - consider blowing their minds by sharing stories of what you were like when you were their age!
How should you group students for Lunch Bunch?
You know your students best. Consider their personalities and needs as well as the purpose of your Lunch Bunch as you decide how to group them. I’ll share a few strategies I’ve used over the years.
1 | Eliminating girl drama
When I first started Lunch Bunch, I had a class full of mean girls. The drama was off the charts and it consumed the class. Something needed to change.
I divided all the girls in my class into groups of 4-5 and made each group a Bunch. Was it awkward? Yes, at first. But eventually, it helped ease the tension. In a relaxed atmosphere, over lunch, the girls got to know each other outside of the drama. They realized the others weren’t so bad after all.
2 | Building rapport
One year, I had an especially hard time getting my Book Club groups to gel. Simply getting conversations started was painful, much less keeping them going. After several failed meetings, I invited the struggling groups to Lunch Bunch.
We spent the first few lunches learning how to connect on a personal level - talking about a shared love of video games, sports teams, hobbies - anything that put them at ease with each other. Sometimes students need help discovering common ground.
Lunch Bunch helped these students become comfortable with each other. Their ease around discussing video games soon transitioned to talking about books!
3 | Combatting behavior issues
I’ve found there are always underlying issues behind any negative behavior problems in the classroom. What presents itself as anger is typically pain, frustration, or hurt.
When you get to the root of the anger, you’re able to address the behavior.
Often, a child simply needs to connect with others, feel part of a group, or make a friend. Lunch Bunch is a great way to do that. For more help on dealing with especially difficult students, see this post.
How can you make your Lunch Bunch successful?
1 | Create - and stick to - a schedule
This will be a challenge. It was for me. I’d tentatively plan to have Lunch Bunch on Tuesday, but something “more important” would always come up. A report that needed to be written or copies that needed to be made. And Lunch Bunch would get pushed to the next week.
The truth? As a teacher, you will always have more work to do in a day than you have hours in which to do it. And there will always be reasons to use those 20 minutes to catch up on some task rather than have lunch with your students. But none of those things are “more important.”
Treat Lunch Bunch like you treat your weekly staff meeting or lunch duty - as an event that can’t get rescheduled or put off until you have time.
One thing that helped me was to schedule Lunch Bunch on the days I also planned to come in early or stay late. That way, I never felt like I had to squeeze work into every possible moment during the day. This removed the temptation to reschedule my lunch date with my students. That extra time in the morning or at the end of the day was for working ahead or getting caught up.
2 | Use pre-printed invitations
When I first started Lunch Bunch, I hand-wrote passes for each student every week. Don’t do that - it took so much time! Instead, create a preprinted form that you simply print, cut apart, and hand out. Major timesaver!
I’ve created Lunch Bunch invitations for you and posted them inside The Treasury. Use them as they are or make changes to the text with the included editable version. I’ve even included a template to print them on sticky notes!
3 | Keep track of Lunch Bunch attendees
The goal of Lunch Bunch is to make connections with and between your students. It’s important that you meet with all students equally to ensure there are no hurt feelings or feelings of favoritism. Track your Lunch Bunch meetings by simply writing down the dates of your Lunch Bunches and which students attended. My Lunch Bunch resource includes a tracker that makes this quick and easy.
Closing note…
Take time to connect with your students over lunch. You’ll get to know them better and discover things that will help you relate to them as individuals and as learners. And they’ll get to know you better, too. The trust you’ll build will go a long way to creating a classroom community in which all of you can thrive!
Make room in your schedule for Lunch Bunch and other student-centered priorities. How? Look for ways to organize, plan, and simplify in order to find the time you need. Need help? I support teachers just like you with courses, resources, tips, and strategies that help you achieve balance. Check out my collection of blog posts and resources.
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