My husband and I have been doing Lunch ‘n’ Learns for more than seven years. We have 835 whiteboards posted to date on my Instagram account, @lunchlesson.

Benefits

Our kids have learned so much, we have been able to create family culture, and their behavior has been much easier to manage at mealtimes.

Things are sometimes a little crazy. There might be three conversations going on at once: a one-on-one check for understanding, a funny dramatic scene only tangentially related between the older children, and someone asking unsuccessfully for the peas. However, I much prefer these interactions to teasing, bullying, complaining, or silence. I think it’s easier to channel the conversation somewhere productive than to punish after it has been unproductive.

Whiteboards stay up for days, and daily I see my children reading them during breakfast or snack, when we typically don’t actively teach. This is so much better than just the back of the cereal box.

We will reference whiteboard topics from years ago. Or they will be presented with a topic at school we have already done. They typically will dive deeper in school, but the kids already have a schema for the topic and they are ready now for the details.

Without the whiteboard I really wouldn’t be able to teach so much, because more children are visual than auditory. And without a simultaneous mealtime, no one would sit down in front of the whiteboard. Classroom management is incredibly difficult during a lecture. I would much rather run over to cut up some meat than to harp on kids to pay attention when they don’t want to.

Also my drawing and handwriting have really improved. I learned to find a reference image on my phone, measure out proportions, and erase multiple times. I picked a handwriting font on the internet, printed an example alphabet, and keep the reference sheet near the board. If you have the patience to scroll all the way to Whiteboard Zero on Instagram, you can see how far I’ve come.

How to

Having an open wall in the kitchen for whiteboards was a must when we picked our house. I understand that moving just to get a whiteboard wall isn’t reasonable. In that situation I’d probably get an easel, and put it away after meals if children are young. We repurposed a poster frame we had, and got dry erase white board material from Home Depot and cut it down to the correct size. This made it so our whiteboard is prettier than the ones you pick up from Walmart, although mine is harder to wipe off than those. It’s not really a dry-erase board, it’s a scrub-with-eraser-spray-with-water-scrub-again-with-a-cloth-wait-for-it-to-dry board.

My husband and I keep a shared list on Google Keep of topics we want to teach. My ideas go at the top and he adds his to the bottom. Every once in a while I’ll put “Generate ten whiteboard topics” on the chore chart and we’ll get some good questions to crank through. I love to find good infographics or charts and reproduce them by hand on the whiteboard. Bryan frequently finds quotes he wants to share. We both reteach lessons we loved in school. I think it is just fine that lessons are wildly out of order. Brains learn what is interesting. Starting at the beginning and learning every step along the way is too easy to be interesting. Brains are actively working to construct knowledge of the world and they can add pieces to their mental models all the time from all disciplines.

The exception here is math; you really need to make sure you cover everything. If a student struggles in Algebra, they probably missed something important in fourth grade. Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, did an experiment. He had half an eighth grade class start with Kindergarten lessons and work forward. The other half started on grade level. The students who started with early math and filled in their holes ended up passing the others, even though they started eight years ahead.

When teaching a whiteboard, you don’t really get to sit and eat. Mealtimes are not always relaxing. If I don’t have the energy I’ll skip a day. Sometimes I spend the entire mealtime just researching and drawing the visual. This is unfortunate, but the whiteboard gets drawn even when I am too busy or lazy to do it on my own time. I think I remember my Child Development professor say that it counts as Family Mealtime if the adult is in the room interacting vaguely. I think that’s what she said, and it makes me feel a little better.

It is tricky to stay on topic when you simultaneously need to help young children eat. Two parents are of course ideal. I recommend baby-led weaning, which is when you put soft stick-shaped foods on the baby’s tray and they feed themselves. My husband really likes it when the meal is all the way prepared on the table before dinner to reduce food chatter. Also we have a culture of saying, “Cafeteria Rules!” This means you have to follow the same rules that our elementary school has, which means you must stay in your seat unless you have a quick errand like needing a fork or a potty break. You can also get up when you are done eating, immediately put your dishes in the dishwasher, and go play or read. If a child is super interested in the topic they might stay after being full, but it’s okay if they walk away. Other children can fill them in on what they miss next time, and the important things will be written on the board for them to read during breakfast tomorrow.

If a child is off topic or not paying attention, I’ll say their name and ask a question or otherwise involve them in the discussion.

A few times I have done a good job with differentiating for different age levels. One day, the whiteboard was about the Letter E. One half explored the enigmatic mathematical concept and the other talked about the phonetic properties of our most common vowel.

Our younger children missed years of white boards, and kids keep saying we need to do some again, but I have never been able to make myself do it. I don’t know why. I think this is where Kidsplanations should come in, when a child is the teacher. It works okay sometimes. More thought is needed here.

When I have said everything I want to, we’ll spend a couple days asking if anyone has questions or comments. If they do, the topic could last for a few more days. If they are done with it, we’ll take a picture and then erase it and move on.