By Hannah Mazzie
The Nook Daycare is an individualized learning experience where children, parents, and teachers grow together to instill children with a love of learning. We use a play-based curriculum with splashes of Reggio Emilia and focus our lesson plans around the children’s interests and needs. Our unique school allows us to focus on purely infants and toddlers. Watching their developmental leaps and helping them accomplish them is the reason we are here. We believe childhood is a time for exploring, creating, discovering one’s self, and meeting the world through many hands on experiences. It is a time for blossoming and should be cherished. We respect parents as the most significant providers of care and nurturance and we are pleased to be an extension of the parents.
Play is essential and it is the way young children learn. With our low student to teacher ratios, our program can be as individualized as possible. The children will refine their social-emotional, language, cognition, gross and fine motor skills here at The Nook. Since we have children from 6 weeks to 3 years of age, this is a huge age for sensory play; hearing, tasting, touching, seeing, and smelling are used daily to help children better understand the world around them.
We keep our little explorers fueled with homemade meals. We serve all organic food across the board and cook everything in house. Our talented cook on staff also makes all of our organic baby food. We do all of our shopping at Whole Foods and our cook plans the menu weekly. We are able to be creative with the food that we serve, providing a large variety of tastes and textures while also providing fresh and healthy meals.
Our teachers are carefully selected based on their education, their relevant experience with children of this age group, and overall personality. This is not just a job to our teachers; this is their career and true passion. We love these kids as if they are our own and coming into work with them everyday is something that we all truly look forward to. Seeing first steps, hearing first words, seeing a child accomplish something they have been working towards makes everything worth it. Parents tell me all the time that when they pull up to The Nook in the morning, their child starts kicking in their car seats with excitement! They are so excited to come to school to see all their friends and teachers and are ready to learn and play! Parents also tell me how much our older kiddos talk about all their teachers at home and even know all their friends names. The social aspect of daycare in general is vastly important to the overall child’s wellbeing and growth. We teach not only academic skills but also life skills: How to deal with problems, how to wait for a turn, how to encourage one another, how to identify not only their own feelings but also the feelings of others, and many, many more. These are skills that we use in everyday life and are instilled in our children here at The Nook from day one.
Our infant program is completely individualized as to how you care for your baby at home. We work extremely close with families to establish a strong trust with their child, our teachers, and parents to ensure that each child is getting exactly what they need. One of our main goals here at The Nook is to see our school as more of a partnership with parents, where both parties share the same goals and expectations to raise a well-rounded child. Every moment of our day with our babies is an opportunity for learning. We tackle motor skills, help each child realize the power of language through books, songs, finger plays, and through positive continuous interaction. We get to know each child exceptionally well and are able to easily identify both verbal and nonverbal messages each child is sending. Our infant program holds both aspects of being loving and nurturing as well as staying developmentally appropriate to be academically challenging.
Our toddler program is designed for the children to explore on a very physical level. We here at The Nook realize that children learn more by doing, rather than being told. Our toddlers are working on becoming autonomous and the teachers respect this and allow the children to be responsible in making their own choices. Expectations for behavior are developmentally appropriate and allow the child to be challenged yet feel the support from their teachers. Our environment allows the children to choose activities and teachers respect their need for ample time to use and reuse learning tools. This fosters competence within the children. We use art as a huge tool for interactive learning and as window for creativity. Sometimes art projects don’t go exactly as planned and you catch a child using something differently than intended. It’s truly a beautiful thing when the children teach us something new and to see how his or her mind works differently or perceives an idea in a new way. We treat each child as completely their own person with different needs, personalities, and feelings and respect each child as such.
We are one of the very few places in Chicago offer drop-in care when short-term space is available, powered with our carefully designed care program and technology.
With our outpouring parent happiness, successful children, and a family of teachers, we are able to expand our Bucktown location and are currently opening up 2 more locations right alongside. We are currently opening a small center right next to our current one and nick-naming it our “Baby Nook”, which will be able to provide care for 12 additional infants! We are also opening a larger center down the block, which will have children from 6 weeks through Preschool! We are so excited and can’t wait to grow our Nook Family!
Come to see us at 2151 W Armitage Ave. Contact us at (872) 802-3833 or h.mazzie@nookdaycare.com. We look forward to knowing you and your precious little ones.
our blog 