The Meal Planning system in Kindertales allows you to create customized menus and meals, populate an inventory of available food and drink items, and set dietary restrictions.
This overview guide will highlight all the places in Kindertales that control and utilize the Meal Planner and link to articles with more detail on each. It is recommended to go through these in the order presented when configuring the Meal Planning system in your account.
Meal Planning – Settings
The Meal Planner Settings section is where you control Menu Types, Meal Times, How it Went options and set control for staff members to be able to submit a typed meal entry via the Kindertales for Classrooms app. Learn more about Meal Planning Settings
Meal Planning – Menu Management
The Menu Management section is where you enter all the individual food and drink items available at your locations. You can specify which menu types and meals these items are available to. Learn more about Meal Planning Menu Management
Meal Planning – Meal Planner (Calendar)
Once you have configured your settings and populated your food and drink items you are now ready to start setting up your meals. The meal calendar allows you to setup meals for one or many locations simultaneously, has powerful copying tools to save you time, and can be viewed by month and by week. Learn more about the Meal Planning Calendar
Enrollment Form – Dietary Restrictions
Included with the Meal Planning system are two questions on the Enrollment Form. These allow parents to select from the menu types you specified in settings as to what their child’s dietary restrictions might be as well as provide more details if needed. Learn more about the Enrollment Form Dietary Restrictions questions
Classroom App – Meal and Drink Daily Activities
The Kindertales for Classrooms app contains two dedicated daily activities that work with the Meal Planning system, Meal and Drink.
System Update Note: The original ‘Food’ Daily Activity is now called ‘Meal’ and utilizes the menu types and meals you’ve setup in the Meal Planner. Now that parents can specify dietary restrictions for their child the ability to ‘Submit All’ for group meal activities has been removed. Group entries can still be recorded but you need to process the group one child at a time.
The ‘Drink’ activity leverages the drinks you’ve created in the Meal Planner as well.
Learn more about the Meal and Drink Activities in the Kindertales for Classrooms app