Lunch Choice Board for Special Education

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 21 pages, 228 type-in fields

• One Lunch Choice Board with a CHOICES panel and a MY CHOICE panel, plus two desk-size boards on one sheet for a folder or a second student
• 5 lunch choice cards, 2 inches square, sized for velcro dots: pizza, sandwich, milk, banana, cheese — with an at-a-glance reference table and a sample pairing to start from
• Every card twice: a full-color page and a black-and-white ink-saver page
• 12 blank choice cards with a type-in word line, for anything the printed set does not cover
• A how-to page: before the first day, the two moves every time, how many choices to offer, and what to do when a student changes their mind
• A Choice Log (16 rows: date, time, choices offered, choice made, made independently Y/N, initials)
• A weekly roll-up (8 weeks) with a percent-made-independently graph
• A filled example — an invented student, one school week on the log and three weeks on the roll-up, every percent re-counted from its own row
• A family page with a kitchen-size board and all five lunch cards on one sheet
• A hand-off page so a paraprofessional, a cafeteria monitor or another classroom runs the same board the same way
• A phrase bank: 20 lines in 5 groups (spoken lines for the board, written starters for the log, the roll-up and the note home)
• A storage and binder label sheet: 10 labels and a spine strip
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

A real choice between five concrete LUNCH options — a hot item, a packed item, a drink, a fruit side and a cheese side — not a snack, and not a step-by-step cafeteria routine to complete. Most choice-card sets stop at the picture; this one adds the log, the weekly roll-up and the phrase bank behind it, so a lunch choice made on a student's own each day turns into a line on a page a case manager can bring to a meeting.

The Cards

• Lunch choices (5) — pizza, sandwich, milk, banana, cheese

Every picture was chosen to be named in one word by a young child, in color AND in the black-and-white set. Pizza stands in for a hot-lunch tray item and sandwich for a packed-lunch item; neither claims to be the only hot or packed option a cafeteria serves.

The Board

• Lunch Choice Board — a CHOICES panel and a MY CHOICE panel with name and today fields.
• Two desk-size lunch choice boards — two boards on one sheet, cut apart, for a folder or a second student.

The board carries no pictures, so it prints the same in color or black and white. There is no request card and no all-done pocket: nothing is being asked for and nothing ends — a student is simply offered real options and picks one.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the board's name field, the log, the roll-up, the family page, the hand-off page and the blank cards, or print and use a pen. The card pages print on cardstock or plain paper and cut along dashed lines. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document.

It is a way to offer a student a real choice between concrete lunch options, and a place to write down which one they picked. It is not a request-to-leave system, a reward chart, a point system with rules, or a program of any kind, and it promises no outcome. It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule; how the board is used with a student, and for how long, is what your team's plan says. The goal line and the criterion field are blanks for your district's own wording and your team's own number. It also makes no claim about any allergy, diet or menu restriction — the CHOICES panel is filled with whatever cards your cafeteria and your team decide belong there, using the blank cards for anything the printed set does not cover.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers, paraprofessionals and cafeteria monitors who build choice-making into lunch for early, pre-reading or emerging-language students, case managers who need that use to show up as data, and the families who get the home page sent home.

More In The Collection

Part of the Visual Supports Collection, alongside Snack Choice Board and Picture Cards, Choice Board and Snack, Play and Work Picture Cards, First-Then Board and Activity Picture Cards, and Cafeteria Routine Visual Schedule Cards; more picture-card sets are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same cards-plus-data shape. Also part of the Visual Supports Collection Bundle, packaged together at 35% off buying them separately (each board keeps its own file).

Pictures (color pages): Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0. Pictures (ink-saver pages): Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License.