My three-year-old twins are fed a "morning snack" at 9:00 at pre-school which consists of cold cereal and fruit. So far, I haven't tried to send an alternate snack to school with them. Instead, I arm my boys with a high fat, high protein breakfast and hope they won't eat much of the snack. I've started getting up a half hour early and I go ahead and fry up some eggs (or scramble them), or sausage or ham. Alternately, I'll give them left-over meat from the night before. My boys still drink milk (with added cream--they think this is funny since I put cream in my tea and they put it in their milk), so they have that too. They eat a big healthy breakfast at about 7:00, then off to school . . . Their teachers have told me since I started doing this (about four weeks ago) that my boys always eat their fruit, but haven't been eating much cereal anymore. In fact, the boys often tell their teachers they aren't hungry and don't want to stop playing to have a snack. Anyway, this has been a good first step in our transition to a "Paleo-inspired whole foods diet". I am waiting until the interim period between semesters in January to ask the school to stop giving the boys cereal and only give them fruit at snack (a younger boy who is on a gluten-free diet is transferring to their classroom at that time and I thought it would be easier to wait until then to start addressing food at pre-school).

I too am having some difficulties when I do have to pack my boys a meal--no matter whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Some things that have worked for us are hard-boiled eggs, cheese wrapped in ham (or another thin-sliced meat), left-over meat (especially hamburgers which my boys like cold), full-fat yogurt, sausage, "fat-bombs" (a no-bake "cookie" with sunflower seed butter, whey powder, coconut oil and a touch of honey), egg-salad or chicken salad (with yogurt not mayo), and left-over grain-free pancakes with nut butter. They've enjoyed my Paleo pizza cold, too, though I think it's pretty disgusting that way. Another strategy might be to try to make the meal high fat, although not necessarily high protein. An avocado dip with veggies might be satisfying with a hard-boiled egg. Lately, I've tried to go heavy on the easy to pack fruits and veggies (and sometimes cheese)--the things that taste good cold-- then make sure the rest of the boys' meals that day are full of meat or eggs and some good fat.

On another note, I did start bringing bananas to the nursery at our church. The teachers used to only give fruit as a snack, but that had slowly morphed into graham crackers and cookies over the past year. I politely handed them enough bananas for all the kids and asked them if they would not give my boys wheat or sugar that day. They not only agreed, they have since gone back to giving mostly fruit or veggies for snacks again! Success!

Good luck! My boys are only at school three days a week, so it's a little easier for me to just concentrate on their meals at home right now and not tackle the bigger issues of what to do about the "food" at nursery school.