Infants have individual personalities. We help bring them to light.
At Kiddie Academy® Educational Child Care, we know that early childhood development provides the baseline for a successful lifetime of learning for your child. Our experienced educators and staff provide loving care and expert guidance so that your infant flourishes during this critical phase of learning.
Our New Beginnings curriculum develops and reinforces each infant’s individuality within a tightknit community. Your child will be assigned a primary educator to promote a deeper understanding of your child’s personality, likes, and developmental needs.
Life Essentials® helps prepare your child for life.
Life Essentials® is our proprietary curriculum designed to nurture, educate, and inspire your child. This unique, holistic curriculum focuses on the development of 6 key outcomes: Character, Confidence, Curiosity, Connection, Critical Thinking, and Creative Expression. Life Essentials’ supporting programs, methods, activities, and techniques help children blossom into prepared students and good citizens. In other words, our curriculum gives your child a happier, healthier, more wellrounded foundation for the future.
New Beginnings
At Kiddie Academy®, we understand that infants are constantly learning. Every time they hear a new sound, they want to know where the sound came from. When they look in a mirror, they want to know who’s staring back at them. With our New Beginnings curriculum, infants learn these concepts and many others throughout the day as they explore and play.
Kiddie Academy’s New Beginnings curriculum is designed to develop and reinforce each infant’s individual needs. Children participate in sensorybased learning experiences while receiving positive, nurturing guidance from highly qualified educators. The curriculum focuses on four main areas of development: Cognitive, Language and Communication, Social and Emotional, and Physical Development.
Cognitive Skills
Infants are building their memories, learning to develop words, and starting to recognize familiar sounds. They’re exploring with their hands and mouths. In our infant room, your child will explore different textured materials, play peekaboo, and complete simple wooden puzzles.
Language and Communication Skills
By developing communication skills, infants learn how to express wants and needs to others. We understand the importance of having educators constantly communicating with your child. These conversations model sounds and patterns of speech for the infants. When educators talk with them, our infants learn labels for actions and emotions, as well as for the people and objects in the room around them. Our educators read books and poems, sing songs, and perform finger plays to develop a rich vocabulary. Our curriculum also emphasizes using American Sign Language frequently with infants, giving non-verbal children a means to communicate with parents and educators.
Social and Emotional Skills
Young children’s social and emotional development revolves around having nurturing and supportive relationships with adults. Emotional development involves infants feeling safe in their environment and secure with adults in their lives. We help your child build trust and attachments by watching your infant’s signals and responding to them. Nurturing relationships between infants and their caregivers are crucial for developing trust, compassion, and empathy. An infant’s social skills consist of smiling, making eye contact, imitating facial expressions, and wanting to be close to other people. Your child will play near other children in their age-appropriate classroom to develop the early bonds of friendship. It shows them they’re important and helps to build their confidence.
Physical Development and Health
Physical development involves both gross motor development and fine motor development. Gross
motor development, also known as large motor development, is the growth and development of the large muscle groups of the body, specifically the muscles of the legs, arms, and trunk. Gross motor development milestones for infants include holding up the head, rolling over, crawling, pulling to a stand, and walking. At Kiddie Academy, infants are provided with plenty of tummy time; they dance to different kinds of music and explore the outdoors in an age-appropriate play space.
Gross motor skills are essential to the development of fine motor skills. Fine motor, or small muscle skills, for infants include holding, pinching, and flexing fingers. We help improve pincer grasp by putting small foods in their hands, then on their tray, so they can feed themselves. They begin to wave hello and goodbye, and explore objects with their hands. By providing each infant with one-on-one attention, stimulating their exploratory efforts and attempts at new skills, they can successfully progress through each stage of physical development.
