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paper and pencil snack made with yellow carrots and tortillas on a blue plate

Fun Paper and Pencil Snack for Back-to-School

By Wendy Copley

My kids don’t start school for another week and I can’t wait. Besides the obvious reasons — Good bye, Constant Bickering! Can’t wait to see you go! — I’m looking forward to making my boys fun lunches and snacks. This Paper & Pencil Snack is a fun one to have waiting when they get home from school. I can’t wait to see their faces when I call them into the kitchen to do their homework and they find something good to eat instead.

supplies for after school snack (tortilla with snap peas, yellow carrots, veggie cream cheese and markers) laying on a cutting board

Ingredients needed to make this Paper and Pencil Snack:

  • flour tortilla
  • veggie cream cheese
  • sugar snap peas
  • yellow carrots (orange will work OK too)

You will also need a paring knife, vegetable peeler and blue, red and black food-safe markers.

a tortilla cut into a square shape laying next to a kitchen knife

How to make paper and pencil snacks:

Begin by trimming the tortilla into a long rectangle shape.

making lines on a square piece of tortilla using a blue food safe marker

Fold it in half, then draw horizontal lines with the blue food-safe marker to resemble a sheet of loose leaf notebook paper.

A tortilla made to look like a paper note pad made with food safe markers

Draw a red line vertically — again to mimic a piece of notebook paper. Add three “holes” to the left side to represent holes.

veggie cream cheese and green onions spread on a tortilla square

Unfold the tortilla and spread it with a layer of cream cheese. Chop up a few sugar snap peas and spread them on half of the tortilla. Fold it closed.

This snack works great with other cream cheese and veggie combos too. Try almost any savory flavor of cream cheese, or mix a bit of garlic and herbs into plain cream cheese. For the veggie you can use chopped pepper, grated carrots, sliced tomatoes, radishes or cucumbers. You could even make this with honey cream cheese and sliced fruit.

peeling a yellow carrot with a black food peeler

Now we’re going to make carrot pencils. I found some yellow carrots which work really well for this, but regular orange carrots would work too. Peel the carrots with a vegetable peeler and cut them into 3 inch chunks.

a black food safe marker being used to color the tip of a yellow carrot that has been cut in the shape of a pencil

Cut the tip of each one into a point, then draw on the tip with the black food-safe marker to make it look like a pencil lead.

paper and pencil after school snack on a blue plate (made with tortillas and yellow carrots)

Put it all onto a plate and then call your kid into the kitchen to do the tastiest homework of the school year!

More Back-to-School Ideas from Alpha Mom:

  1. Free Printable Personalized Bookplates for Back-to-School
  2. Washi Tape and Wrapping Paper Book Covers DIY
  3. New School Year Calendar Stickers Printable for Back-to-School
About the Author

Wendy Copley

Wendy Copley is a cook, writer, crafter, lunch-packer, wife and mom. Whenever she goes too long without doing something creative, she starts to lose her mind, so she’s always working on some ...

Wendy Copley is a cook, writer, crafter, lunch-packer, wife and mom. Whenever she goes too long without doing something creative, she starts to lose her mind, so she’s always working on some sort of project. Her focus frequently shifts from sewing to baking to paper-crafting to creating with her kids but she is unwavering in her devotion to packing cute, mostly-healthy bento box lunches for her two boys.

You can follow her adventures on her blog Wendolonia or you can learn all her lunch box secrets from her book, Everyday Bento: 50 Cute and Yummy Lunches to Go.

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