Program is Mana's group planning space. It's where you create your weekly, fortnightly, or term programs for a room or home group, and where your individual planning and group planning connect into one clear picture.

Program and Journeys work together. Journeys holds each child's individual planning cycle, their goals, observations, and learning stories. Program pulls from those goals to support your group planning, and plans you create in Program can flow back into a child's individual journey.

Because of this connection, it's worth setting up children and their goals in Journeys before you start building programs. The more context Mana has, the more useful the AI planning features become.

The first step in Program is creating your rooms (or home groups). Each room becomes the container for your group program. Once a room is set up, you add children to it so Mana knows who the program is for.
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→ How do I create a room/group and add children?

→ Where can I edit the rooms?

Inside each room, you can create a program for your planning period, weekly is most common, but you can also plan fortnightly, monthly, or by term.

Programs use a customisable template with columns (e.g. days of the week) and rows (e.g. curriculum areas or domains). You can create them in two ways.

Option 1: You can add these as permanent areas from your room / home profile settings:
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​Option 2: Create the areas directly from within each individual program by week / month / term, linking to future programs only if you choose to (using the toggle). Your template carries forward each time you create a new program as long as you toggle on "Link to future programs" when creating them:

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Once your template is ready, notice plans (that are not yet marked done) from child journeys appear in the program. You can click and drag to shift these across cells as needed or even show across multiple cells using the options (three dots) icon where it's relevant.

Start creating plans. There are two ways to add plans to your program:

Option 1. Create manually: click "Create document" inside the program to write a plan directly. You can create a plan for the whole group or for an individual child. Group plans aren't automatically linked to individual children — use Add Child to tailor the plan for a specific child and connect it to their Journey.
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2. Use Suggest (AI-assisted): click Suggest and Mana reviews all the children's current goals from their Journeys. It then generates group activity ideas designed to address multiple children's goals at once. Use the "Why this?" button to see how each suggestion connects to individual children. Select a suggestion and click Create Plan to generate content automatically.
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Plans can also be linked to source documents (such as an observation or group learning story) and follow-up documents, giving you a clear thread of evidence across the planning cycle.

→ Create permanent curriculum areas for your group programs
​→ Curricula just got smarter: Introducing Program--> group planning, tailored to each child

You can write a single learning story that mentions multiple children, and Mana will identify each child and create a personalised version for their individual Journey. This saves time while keeping documentation meaningful for each family.
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​→ Curricula just got smarter: Introducing Program--> group planning, tailored to each child

Once your program is ready, you have two sharing options:

Print: export in landscape format as a summary table, suitable for displaying in the room. You can exclude images or individual learning stories for a clean overview. If you've added educator reflections, use a vague title for them so nothing unintended appears on the printed copy.

Share via the Mana app: sharing from within the Program sends the plan to all families in that room. Sharing from within a child's individual Journey sends it to that child's family only. Families receive a notification and see the document (not the full program template). Reflections are only shared if you explicitly click Share on them.

​→ How to share your program with families

After activities are implemented, you can reflect on each plan directly in the program, adding notes and ticking off what was completed. Reflections are not shared with families unless you choose to share them, so this is a safe space for honest professional reflection.

Important note: In your program, you can filter between "Plans" or "All docs" to easily view by preference. Ensure you're in the "All docs" filter to see learning stories, reflections and other types of documents added to the program.
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Use this to make sure everything is in place before you start programming:
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✓ Children added in the Journeys tab

✓ Goals set for each child in their Journey

✓ Rooms/homes created in the Program tab

✓ Children added to their rooms or homes

✓ Permanent curriculum areas set up in each room / home (optional but recommended)

✓ New program created within the room for your planning period (weekly/fortnightly/termly)

✓ Plans added, manually or via Suggest

✓ Group plans linked to individual children's Journeys where relevant

✓ Program shared with families or printed for room display

✓ Educator reflections added after activities are completed