Why kids need recess and lunch

Why kids need recess and lunch

Why kids need lunch

One of the new mums at our school was questioning the sense in having both a recess and a lunch break during the school day. “There’s too much useless play time,” she exclaimed.  “Shouldn’t they skip recess and serve lunch at midday and then they can just get on with classwork?”

This woman has clearly never faced a long afternoon teaching 25 five year olds how to read. (Well, neither have I, but I can imagine the horror.) Teachers need a recess and a lunch break, no doubt about it. But, possibly even more importantly, kids need both breaks as well.

These days, most schools break the school day into three separate eating occasions – Crunch&Sip (a short break, generally in the classroom), recess and lunch time. The time allocated to recess and lunch, and the times during the school day that they take place, vary from school to school but recess is generally the first time in the day that a child is ‘let loose’ from the classroom environment.


Despite Crunch&Sip falling some time mid-morning, by recess kids are positively starving and spend a good proportion of the break hoovering most of what’s in their lunch box. It takes a lot of time to eat when you’re a kid. This is why packing foods that kids can ‘eat on the go’ is so important. A huge, uncut sandwich is not going to get eaten and a large, unpeeled orange will most likely be passed up, too. Cutting foods up into small portions allows kids to grab and get on the move.

Recess and lunch

Lunch and recess breaks are definitely times to encourage kids to eat on the hop. Quite apart from being pit-stops for refuelling, school breaks give kids an opportunity to race around madly and let off all the pent-up steam of the classroom. Recess and lunch are like the classroom’s pressure valves.

If kids were to sit down to eat their meal, chances are the bell would ring for class before they could even finish, allowing no time at all for a rousing game of hand ball, handstands or hide-and-seek. This kind of physical activity is just as important for our child’s educational development as the food we pack in the lunch box - and maybe even as important as the lessons taught in the classroom.

The benefits of being physically active when you’re a kid are numerous – activity promotes healthy growth and development, strong bones and muscles, improved cardiovascular fitness and a healthy weight (see more about this at Good for Kids). At school, physical activity can also help a child’s concentration levels, which will allow them to focus on their school work and to retain what they’ve been taught.

Hungry tummies create distracted minds

If you’ve ever helped in the classroom pre-lunch time, you’ll have witnessed for yourself how restless and inattentive the class can be at this time of the day.  Hungry tummies demand attention more than maths at this time of the day, but their restlessness is also due to being asked to concentrate in the classroom for longer than they’d like. Getting out and having a good ‘play’ allows them to stretch, jump, hop, skip and burn off some of that pent-up energy. When the bell rings for lunch, kids are like thoroughbred racehorses champing at the bit in the stalls. Ding, ding, ding and they're off and racing!

Unlike organised sport (which is, of course, highly beneficial for all kids), play time at school allows children to make up their own games and their own rules. They get to decide what will happen and establish the boundaries within which their games will take place. This kind of play time is highly social – there's no one to monitor their talk or interactions and it’s to children’s great credit that 99 percent of the games they play are worked out empathetically and fairly between them.

The more autonomy we allow them to have in the playground, the more active and engaging their play becomes. Can you imagine letting your kids roam within your neighbourhood with loads and loads of other kids and only a couple of parents ‘on duty’? Most parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it, but it’s amazing how well kids manage when we let them. Giving them the independence to explore encourages them to be as physically active as they are curious.

But back to the classroom. Once the bell has sounded on the last break of the day, most classrooms move into a quieter mode. Kids have tuckered themselves out nicely during the lunch break and most are ready to settle into a lesson that exercises their creative mind. Physical activity definitely allows the mind to settle but it also gives it the courage to think outside the box. From creativity comes great innovation and invention – surely a critical part of any child’s education.

So, with all that eating and active play, kids definitely need their recess and lunch breaks. So I’ll be encouraging the new mum at our school to do a few pre-break and post-break classroom helping sessions, so she can see for herself just how important those two school breaks really are. Hopefully she’ll never look at ‘play time’ as being ‘useless’ time again!

Why kids need recess and lunch

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