Our goal is to facilitate your child's growth as a whole person
This means that we care about their intellectual growth, their physical growth, their social growth, and their emotional growth. We are here to create an environment where all these kinds of growth can happen. To do this we will use every interaction we have with your child. Your child is always learning about himself/herself, their environment, and the people they relate to. The conclusions they come to about what kind of place this world is and what kind of people thay are will color and influence the rest of their life. The attitudes they learn from the people around them will be crucial to their success, their happiness, and their ability to learn and be creative.
The TLC program is based on a number of assumptions:
1. Children must feel secure, their basic needs met, before they are free to be curious to explore, to learn fully and to be creative.2. Children are learning all the time - every minute. We can only facilitate or hinder the process.
3. It is the process of learning and creating and becoming competent that is essential, not the product.
4. Every child is an individual with his own perfect pace and way of learning.
5. Emotional, social, physical and intellectual growth are all equally important.
6. Every situation is an opportunity for learning.
7. Children are just as aware of non-verbal messages as what we say.
8. Children, no matter how young, are capable of making choices and making their needs known.
9. Children are capable of understanding far more and doing much more than we ever suspected.
10. Emotional health is based on knowing what you feel and being able to express your feelings.
11. Children deserve to be loved and respected for just who they are, not for what they can do.
12. Punitive reactions increase resentment and anger, lower self-esteem, and increase the likelihood of more undesirable behavior.
We want to prepare children to interact effectively and be successful outside of the center.
We strive to provide an environment in which children can: learn social skills, positive ways to get what they want from other children and adults, learn how to ask for what they want, learn about trust and safety, learn to be appropriately assertive, develop new areas of competence socially, physically, intellectually and creatively, learn to respect others, learn give and take, learn to be self-regulating, learn empathy, develop age-appropriate skills, develop confidence in their own thinking and problem-solving abilities, develop positive self-esteem, and find joy in accomplishment, learn to communicate effectively and to deal with conflict, learn to know themselves as distinct and unique individuals with likes, feelings, and values.
We encourage the children to: show kindness, courtesy and tolerance, be self-directed, develop their potential as loving human beings, to express their thoughts and feelings.
It is the people and their assumptions, attitudes, values,
Child care is probably one of the most demanding and challenging professions that exist. Teachers at TLC care passionately about education and fostering creativity and learning. We believe that a child's early learning experiences have a crucial impact on their capacity to learn and grow and be whole people.
The absolutely crucial variables in a learning environment are how you interact with a child, your assumptions about how learning happens, your attitudes, your values, and how you react to a child's aggressiveness, his fears, his demands, his accomplishments, and his feelings.
The focus at TLC is on organic learning. Let me use the example of ABCs or numbers to talk about organic learning. We do use letters and numbers, point them out matter of factly, use them to block print, answer kids' questions about them, use numbers to talk about the number of kids at the table and the number of glasses we will need. But numbers or letters are not a separate lesson divorced from our everyday routines, and no one is a better or worse person because he knows or doesn't know them.
Another focus we have is in celebrating diversity. We encourage our bi-lingual teachers, students, and visitors to teach our children other languages, cultural mores, dances, music, foods. Many of our classroom activities and books educate the children about other cultures and ways of approaching life. We believe that by bringing children diversity when they are young, we help them understand and appreciate the wider world they will participate in, and help them with language development, and flexibility.
We help your child to take pleasure in what he can do rather than rewarding him for performing to please us. True happiness and true learning comes from learning what you like; it comes from doing for yourself. We do model behavior we'd like your child to learn. When we genuinely are pleased, we say thanks; we ask for things in a pleasing tone of voice, often using the word please, but we don't ask the kids to learn these things by rote, or to say them when they don't mean them.
Organic learning uses the situation we are involved in to explore, to raise questions, to conceptualize, to look at feelings. A child learns when he gets hurt. If we acknowledge his pain, put his feelings into words, react in a caring and concerned way, then he will grow up able to acknowledge and respond to other people's pain, and he will grow up trusting other people and able to be honest and act consistently with his feelings. If we are fearful and over-concerned, he learns to be afraid of getting hurt. If the child is afraid and we rescue him rather than support him and facilitate his learning, he learns to avoid fearful situations and never knows the joy of learning to do something difficult by himself.