Welcome To The 1’s!

Now that your child is walking, the world is opening up to them in an amazing new way. Our teachers are excited to help them discover all of its many wonders!  Our teachers strive to be responsive and caring at all times to your child’s needs. We nurture your child while encouraging language development, fine and gross motor skills, self-help and social skills.

We divide our 1’s class into 2 smaller primary care groups with consistent teachers to ensure continuity of care. This allows the child and teacher to develop a closer bond so that teacher can better meet each child’s individual needs.  The teachers are also then able to support each child’s developmental needs by differentiating activities in these smaller group sizes.

Learning through Play

In this period of rapid growth and development, your energetic toddler is manipulating, moving and touching.  He is becoming more independent and the desire to demonstrate his ability to be more self-sufficient is increasing. We believe that through play children can develop social and cognitive skills, mature emotionally, and gain the self-confidence required to engage in new experiences and environments. Our children enjoy the variety of toys, such as rocking puppies, balls, large building blocks, kitchen center with food and dolls, as well as dress-up clothes that have been specifically chosen for their particular age.

At Bright Star, our multi-experiential curriculum is stimulating and fun. It has been designed to help your child’s cognitive, physical and emotional development grow every day as he participates in a variety of play experiences: art such as finger-painting, music with finger-plays, movement through games and dancing, educational toys, pretend play and sensory play with sand and water. Language development is encouraged through reading books and looking at pictures as well as using repetition while identifying objects that children are using or asking for.

Learning extends beyond the classroom, as we make sure to take the toddlers out to our fun, shaded playground once in the morning and once in the afternoon to explore and play.

Our themes change weekly and have been carefully chosen to ensure that they are both interesting and developmentally appropriate for toddlers of this age.

Positive Guidance:

We believe that every opportunity is an opportunity to learn and our teachers are trained on using positive techniques in the classroom. We primarily use re-direction and teach our children what choices or behavior are better options, as opposed to focusing on the negative behavior. We also work on teaching children empathy by having them help take care of a friend they may have played too rough with. Time-out is never used in the one’s classroom, we don’t feel it is the most appropriate or productive way to teach a one year old child.

Communicating with our Parents

We give our parents a Communication Sheet which details, your child’s morning activities, nap time, diapering notes and other interesting information about their day. We have an open door policy, and invite our parents to come by anytime. Our teachers also work hard to ensure that they capture and document many of your child’s developmental milestones, though our individual portfolios.