in search of day care
Written by jlz on August 10, 2007 – 8:20 pm -anZel’s 15 months now and it’s about time to kick him out of the house!! beeber and I really wants him to have some structure or routine in his daily life, instead of the do-whatever-you-like-during-whatever-time type of routine. Well, the only routine he has really is to sleep around 8:30-9pm. (I am also secretly hoping that we make the feeding issue someone else’s problem. 
We’ve started looking at some of the day cares around here. Most of the day cares aren’t that great. I am starting to think our requirements are too stringent.
1. Given that Mandarin is the official language in China, we wanted anZel to learn Mandarin. So we wanted to find a place where they speak good Mandarin. Half-a** mandarin-speaking day cares are definitely no-go. This requirement essentially limits us to only Chinese day care places.
2. We don’t want half-a** English speaking places either. We are not worried that anZel won’t learn English. After all, we live in the good ol’ U S of A. What we don’t really want is anZel pick up “strange” accents. So if we visit a day care that speaks English to the kids and have a heavy accent, it’s a no go. (We visited one today and it really bugged us.)
3. We speak Cantonese at home and we do want anZel to continue to speak Cantonese. But same as #1 and #2, we don’t want anZel to pick up some “bad” Cantonese accent. So half-a** Cantonese speaking places are out.
Ok, by now you are probably calling us snobs and that our requirements are dumb. But hey, we just want the best for anZel. Many Chinese day care these days claim multi-lingual in order to attract parents. the unfortunate thing is that most of them have heavy “weird” accents in at least 1 language. Some even have problem with all 3!!
Aside from daily routines and languages, we also wanted anZel to have a place to learn.
4. The place has to provide structured education for the kids. We really do like day cares that provide some form of structured learning for kids. Most places provide a curriculum, but you really have to sit through one of them before you know how they teach. There’s a lot of places also claim to follow the MONTESSORI philosophy. Be sure you watch how the kids play and interact with the teachers.
5. As mentioned in #4, we would like to sit through a session or two to see how kids interact. Some of the Chinese places we have been to seems to not want parents to sit through the sessions. The excuse being that they don’t want the kids to be distracted. Well, I am sorry but I don’t think it’s fair for the parents to just “take your words for it.”
6. The place must be bright. Some of the day cares we saw are in fairly dark houses and we really prefer to find one that’s bright. We believe brighter places have happier kids.
7. It goes without saying the place must be clean. If I see carpets are all stained or got tons of black stuff on it, that place is out.
8. We would prefer to have a place where there’s outdoor activities. anZel’s been going out to the local park almost every day since he’s 3 months old. He loves going outside. We would hate to have him locked up in the house all day long.
9. Teacher to kids ratio must not exceed 1:4. We saw some places that have ratio of 1:6, which is crazy!! (I thought that’s illegal?)
let’s see..what else…
Posted in Day Care, Education, anZel |
August 10th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
so nice to see dAd writes an entry on the blog he started. It’s especially nice (shocking really) to see him get on the soap box after seeing ONE daycare that meets most of his expectations. Gracis, Xie Xie, Danke, grazie, merci…:-x(2)