Here's a free printable meal planner template that you can use to fill out your family's weekly meal plan, so everyone knows what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the week in your home.
This form is designed to be used in conjunction with the Healthy Meal Planning & Grocery List Challenge here on the site, where you begin (or continue) to plan your family's meals ahead of time.
Filling out this template each week is pretty self-explanatory, really, especially if you read all the steps from the Challenge itself which discusses the concept of meal planning in more detail.
The biggest thing you need to consider is whether you actually want to fill out the breakfast and lunch columns each week, or not.
Sometimes I plan all the meals for the day, like when the kids are home for the summer breaks, but not when they're in school during the rest of the year. You may be similar, for a variety of reasons, but if you don't want to plan all the meals no problem.
You can either print out one form and place it in a page protector, and fill it out with a dry erase marker and erase each week, or print out a different form for each week.
If you want to save yourself time I wouldn't throw away the weekly plan when the week is over if you print out a new form each week. Instead, I would save the plans you've made and then eventually you can begin rotating them, after 6-8 weeks.
In addition, make sure that after you plan your meals with this form that you fill out the grocery shopping list with everything you need from the store to make this week's meals.
Finally, if you'd like to combine your meal planning and grocery list making form together I've made a form for that here!
Click here to get your printable
(opens into a new window, as PDF)
A reader, Adrianne, sent in this photo of how she uses the form. She only plans dinners, so she kept the other columns blank, but kept the form inside a page protector sheet so she could reuse it over and over again, as I suggested above you could do.
She explained, "On my to-do today list is meal plan. Since we are traveling I did it for the next two weeks and included a grocery list for after we get back!"
![]() Printable Grocery List Form (3 pages) |
![]() Weekly Dinner Menu + Premade Grocery List Sample |
![]() Menu Board Ideas |
If you struggle to make menu plans and would love for someone to make them for you, plus make a grocery list for you, it’s well worth spending a few dollars every week to let Eat at Home do the work for you.
Check out my review of the Eat at Home meal plans here, and why it's one of my favorite family meal planning services.
Do you have an Instant Pot hiding in your cabinet? Want to learn how to use it? Sign up for Instant Pot School! It's free, and it will help you put that time-saver to work!
Learn more about this free course, and why I'm recommending it in my article all about Instant Pot School.
Share Your Comments, Tips & Ideas
I would love to hear from you, sharing your thoughts, questions, or ideas about this topic, so leave me a comment below. I try to always respond back!