Home Daycare Menus

Running a home daycare requires creativity, planning and preparation. The operator of a home daycare is responsible for entertaining, cleaning up after and caring for the children. This includes providing meals that are nutritious and appealing to young children. Knowing what to serve as well as how to serve it to picky eaters is important.

Nutritional Guidelines

• The United States Department of Agriculture provides guidelines for nutritional menu planning for child care providers, including home daycare providers. These guidelines include portion sizes, daily values, and daily requirements for children. Child care providers should be aware of these requirements before planning a menu to ensure that nutritional meals and snacks are being provided. The USDA also provides caregivers with guidelines for safe food preparation, ideas for menu planning and information on special diets.

Monthly Menu Planning

• Caring for children, especially young children, can quickly become hectic. Planning ahead for the week and even the month is essential to avoid trying to figure out what to fix for a meal or snack that not only meets nutritional standards but is appealing to finicky eaters. Before starting a new month, the daycare provider should write out a menu plan for each week. This plan should include the meals provided each day as well as snacks. Having this plan ready allows the provider to have a ready shopping list for each week and inform parents of what their children will be offered in case a packed lunch is needed on a particular day.

The Weekly Menu

• Each week, the menu should change enough to offer children a variety of food options. The menu can be posted for the week for the children and parents, but more importantly to keep the child care provider on schedule and organized when it comes time for meals and snacks. The weekly menu is vital for grocery shopping and for preparing for each day's meals and snacks.

Creative Menu

• It is not always easy to come up with new ideas for meals and snacks, especially if one has been preparing creative meals and snacks for a while. There are numerous websites that offer innovative ideas for cooking for children. Many include ideas for getting children to eat healthy food. Cookbooks that offer new ways to serve nutritious meals are also available, including "Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica Seinfeld. This book mixes purees of fruits and vegetables in foods such as mashed potatoes and spaghetti to provide nutritious meals that fool even the pickiest of eaters. Pureed cauliflower mixed with mashed potatoes provides a helping of vegetables children won't even realize they are eating, and there are many other similar ideas.

Food Safety

• When preparing a menu for a home daycare, consider food safety. This includes watching the expiration dates on foods, keeping the kitchen and cooking implements clean, and ensuring that food is prepared properly. If there are meal ideas on the menu that include such foods as peanuts or strawberries, make sure that no child is allergic to those foods, offer another item in its place and avoid cross-contaminating the foods.