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.
How Program connects to Journeys
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.
Setting up your rooms
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.
Creating a new program
Follow these steps to set up the Room’s layout and begin planning.
Step 1: Set up the Program Template
Before creating a Program, set up the Room’s Program Template if you want to choose its columns, optional rows and order. This setup is optional but recommended.
Open the Room, then select Profile.
Select Program Template.
Choose and reorder the Room’s Program columns and Program rows.
If the template is read-only for you, ask a manager or owner to make changes. Changes apply to new Programs only; Programs already set up won’t change.
Step 2: Create the Program
Inside the Room, select New Program and create a Program for your planning period. Weekly is most common, but you can also plan fortnightly, monthly or by term.
Step 3: Arrange plans
When the new Program opens, notice plans that are not yet marked done from child Journeys appear in it. You can click and drag to shift these across cells as needed or show them across multiple cells using the options (three dots) icon where relevant.
Step 4
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.
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.
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.
→ How do I set up a Program Template for a Room?
→ Curricula just got smarter: Introducing Program--> group planning, tailored to each child
Group learning stories
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.
→ Curricula just got smarter: Introducing Program--> group planning, tailored to each child
Sharing with families
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: share the documents you want families to see individually. Once at least one document is shared, the Program is available to families; this does not automatically share every activity in the weekly Program. Check the intended audience of each document. An individual child’s plan should be shared only with that child’s family. Educator reflections stay unshared unless you choose to share them.
Educator reflections
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.
Program setup checklist
Use this to make sure everything is in place before you start programming:
✓ 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
✓ Program Template set up in each Room or 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
✓ Intended Program documents shared individually with the right families, or the Program printed for room display
✓ Educator reflections added after activities are completed