Halloween Themed Kindergarten Snacks

My daughter's kindergarten class has been focusing on one letter of the alphabet per week for the last several weeks and she has wanted to take lunches representing items or animals that start with the letter of the week. Therefore, my plans of lots of Halloween themed lunches for her have not played out the way I planned. But, I have been packing some her spooky snacks and this is a post to share some of those. First, we have a snack with large black bat picks holding raspberries and grapes. There are a few pretzels in the back and some chocolate covered sunflower seeds in the small green container, along with a pumpkin-shaped piece of cheddar cheese. My husband fund these picks at TJMaxx. I had to cut down the ends because the sticks were about eight inches long.

Another day, scarecrows were holding grapes that I placed on top of a few apple slices in a pumpkin-shaped silicone cup. Below that were a few peanut butter pretzels in a spider silicone cups. In a different snack, she had bat-shaped cheddar cheese bites with mini Saltine crackers in a pumpkin-shaped silicone cup along with apple slices and an Andes mint. Both of these snacks were packed in small Fit&Fresh boxes. I like these when I am using picks that are kind of tall or when I want to use a slightly wider containers like these pumpkin and spider cups.

She had a very simple and quick snack in a round Sistema container one day. The top layer held a small container of almonds, a gummy worm, a few apple slices cut like leaves and some Pirates's Booty. This container is great for packing something bulky like this popcorn and the two layers allow for quick and easy separation of the wet and dry foods.

On two other days, I decorated sugar cookies that were leftover from a baby shower that we hosted. I drew a web on one with a food safe marker and added a spider from a Martha Stewart die-cut set. Along with the cookie, she had green and purple grapes on spider picks, and a few Spiderman Cheez-Its in a spider cupcake liner. I used markers to decorate the other cookie like a Jack-o-Lantern. She had grapes and pretzel rods along with it. Both of the cookies were very fast to make and I was pleased with the way these snacks came together with minimal time invested.

Another snack was packed using my homemade Halloween silicone cups. It held a skull-shaped granola bite, a homemade skull-shaped gummy, bat-shaped pieces of apple, and few Cheez-Its. I was trying to sell my daughter on the idea of eating the granola bite by making it look cool in the skull, but she didn't go for it. She ate everything else and tried to pick the eyes and mouth off of the skull, but didn't eat it. I have been trying to get her to believe that these are very much like chocolate chip cookies, but so far she isn't buying it.

Lastly for this post, I will share one of my daughter's letter A Lunches. On Sunday night, as we talked about things that begin with the letter A, she got the idea that, "She needed an ax lunch for Monday. Ax starts with A - A X spells Ax." she said repeatedly.  I tried to suggest other items or animals that begin with A as alternatives because I wasn't sure that the school would be crazy about the idea of a kindergartner bringing an ax-themed lunch to school, but she was persistent. She needed the ax lunch. "The ax lunch should spell A X, the ax in the ax lunch should have a wooden handle, the ax in the ax lunch should be cutting her cucumber, and so on." So, I packed the ax lunch:

She had an ax-shaped peanut butter sandwich that I cut with a flag cookie cutter and then modified. I used pretzel rods for the wooden handle, and spelled AX in cheddar cheese. The ax was on top of carrots and sugar snap peas and packed along with tomatoes, cucumber, grapes, Goldfish, and a few gummies. I couldn't figure out how to position the sandwich so that it was slicing the cucumber the way she wanted, so instead I used a saw pick to cut the cucumber. I also added a mini clothespin with a zombie head because I thought it was cute along with the crazy ax idea. By the way, no one at school objected to the lunch, and she ate everything *except* the ax. Kids!