During infancy, children develop motor skills, experience tummy time, explore and learn through interaction with their teachers. Our caregivers for infants use this opportunity to work on stretches, leg movements, and ensuring the children are practicing hand-eye coordination in order to prepare themselves for the next stages of early childhood development. As they reach late infancy, our caregivers work with children to develop those core muscles. They’re learning to crawl, express their emotions, and move their legs and arms. Cognitively, they are learning to identify and recognize family members and caregivers as they walk into the room. They’re even learning to produce those first adorable babbling sounds we love to hear.

By this stage, a child’s leg muscles are ready—once they stand up and take those first steps, they’re off and running, eager to explore. Our toddler education program offers them the opportunity to do so in safety (with our caregivers alert and ready to walk around the room with the children) and also allows them to develop cognitive skills as they build language, graduate to one to two-word sentences, learn to hold a crayon and eat finger foods. This is also when our toddlers acquire self-helping skills, such as communicating their needs or picking up after themselves.

Twaddlers still have the need to explore, but with far more to learn and experience—while still having lots of fun! Up until now, most of the play with infants and toddlers has been independent. To get twaddlers more accustomed to social participation, we start each morning with group circle time. This stage also marks the beginning of a child’s potty-training journey. Our staff frequently asks each child if they have to go to the restroom, and then guides them through the process. Before you know it, you have a potty-trained child. Our curriculum helps twaddlers explore, and it nurtures their increasing need to communicate. By this point in their early childhood development, twaddlers have expanded their language skills, and our curriculum helps to enhance their ability to communicate verbally.

The Prepper program was designed to meet the special needs of maturing children to build a perfect bridge to the classroom that will come next. As children reach this stage, they experience rapid increases in physical, cognitive, developmental and social skills. We introduce them to My Little L.E.A.P.® Books, designed to challenge those skills and to teach children about language, letter recognition, shapes, colors, numbers, science, manners, etiquette, math, art, music and physical fitness. Once children are mature enough to handle “potty time” by themselves, they may enter our prepper program, where continued potty training is reinforced and teachers are prepared for “potty accidents.” As society becomes increasingly more driven by technology, it’s more important that children are introduced to technology at an early age. At TLE®, our preppers begin this early education process with a very basic introduction to computers and technology.

Preschoolers are growing up—potty trained and ready to conquer the world! At this stage, they absorb all of the information around them and are eager to master the new skills they acquire. That’s why we equip our preschool classrooms with challenging equipment and toys to help satisfy the children’s appetite for knowledge. Our preschools are broken up into three completely separate classes according to chronological age and developmental stage. We do this to provide an environment where children can be independent and exercise a variety of personal, social, and emotional skills with children at similar stages of development.

Entering kindergarten is one of the biggest steps your child will take and selecting the appropriate kindergarten environment is important. Our kindergarten classes combine our L.E.A.P early education curriculum with an environment of fun, open-ended exploration, investigation, discovery, and building self-confidence and self-esteem. It’s the perfect opportunity for optimum growth in academics, socialization, physical fitness, and emotional well-being.