Keeping cold snacks when sending kids to school.

Any recomendations? My 4 year old will be starting school this year and i am puzzled as to what will work best,lol.

I look at the funtainer food jars and wonder if they work...i mean they better for the price they are! Then i look at the cheaper thermos plastic ones and then i debate whether to just get a hot/cold bag and throw it in something in her backpack or a couple things combined! I just don't know what works and am wondering if any other parents can reccomend a way to go about it.

I'll get packaged snacks sometimes i guess but i'm just thinking it would be healthier if i do it this way sometimes plus less packaging is good for the enviroment.

In the beginning we had a character lunch bag that was small, but it was hard to fit in all his plastic containers with snacks, lunch, etc.(we try to do mostly garbage-free lunch). Sometimes we don't give him a main course like a sandwich because the sandwich would come back with one bite out of it. Many times it's all snacks, it takes up a lot of room.

Recently we've started using a small green cooler bag from Sobeys, same thing that DH and I use for our lunch, they cost about $2.50. I have a small icepack that I can toss into DS's lunchbag to keep his food like yogurt, chicken, etc. fairly chilly.

I do have a small metal thermos I got from Amazon that is suitable for a hot meal like spaghetti, etc., bought it with my Swagbucks Amazon GC, works great. If I have a hot thing in his lunch, that is in his backpack and outside the insulated lunch bag where there's cold things, I find that the thermoses do give off some heat.