Monday-Friday 5:45 am-5:45 pm

• Play based learning:
  • Children learn through playing, doing, exploring, manipulating, engaging, creating, feeling, singing, and/or building. Children learn through ACTION such as sitting, baking, choosing, running, experiencing, loving, moving, and experimenting
• Teachers at Hilty provide the children with experiences that will allow, encourage, and guide these actions to facilitate further the development of learning experiences
• Children thrive when moving while learning
  • Often you will find us dancing, jumping, swinging, running, and/or engaging in parachute play and more.
• Child-Centered learning
  • Education based on child’s interests
    • You will find that our teacher’s plans change in adapt based upon what your child(ren)’s interests are

• We provide quality care and education to children from six weeks through 12 years old. The childcare center provides a very special program.
• On a daily basis, we strive to:
  • Provide high quality, loving care in a Christian environment.
  • Offer opportunities to develop various skills through a variety of learning experiences and materials.

• Our purpose is to provide a safe, nurturing environment that meets the physical, emotional, cognitive and social needs of a child.
• Our role is to create an enriching, loving, Christian environment that recognizes each child’s unique qualities.
• Activities and interactions are designed to develop children’s self-esteem, independence, and positive feelings toward learning.
• We believe that children should be given the opportunity to select many of their own activities from a variety of learning areas including, dramatic play, large motor activities, science, math, games, puzzles, books, art and music.
• We also believe that children need structure in their day; we provide this through circle time, guided art activities, small group time and transition time.

We get messy so you don’t have to!  We all know how important it is for children to get in there and play –  A little dirt won’t hurt!  However, it’s hard for parents to be able to do this when you add laundry, cooking, cleaning, and mental fatigue to THEIR DAY.   So, we make sure to do it here.  Getting messy with paint, water, slime, goo, rice, bubbles, and chalk – we got you covered!

We believe in the conscious discipline at HFF.  Instead of punishing or correcting the behavior our goal is to ask the question WHY?

What is causing the child to act in this way and how do we help a child express their emotions in a self-regulatory way?  Our first goal is to make sure basic needs are met – is the child hungry? Tired? Dealing with outside stress? Changes in the environment?  Is there a trigger that is causing it?  A child does not knock another child’s block tower over for fun, there is always a reason.

By sitting with the child and talking it out, using and teaching words to label these emotions, our goal is to create an environment of emotionally healthy and confident children.

Time out free zone – If a child cannot SWIM, would you put them in time out until they learn to swim? So why would we put a child in time out because they don’t know HOW to regulate their emotions?

We use a calm down “safe place” area for children who need some separation for a moment.  The cozy tree hut has books, toys, and emotional identifier cards to help children express what they are feeling.  However, we don’t stop there.  We teach the children how to ask for forgiveness and how to talk to their friends if needed.   Modeling and even role-playing with a child to give them the words, courage, and confidence to do it themselves.

Teaching a child how to navigate emotionally healthy relationships is a key component of our program.

We believe in teaching the WHOLE child.  Not all children learn the same.  By looking at the child individually and seeing their specific needs, we can learn how to teach THEM best.  We believe that each lesson should be taught visually, auditory, with reading and teacher writings, and by doing (kinesthetics)

We say NO THANK YOU to ditto sheets. Having preschoolers sit and write the letter “Aa” 20 times and color an alligator green is teaching them that they don’t like schoolwork!  We believe that play-based learning can be done with hands-on experience and positive reinforcement. Having one child write the letter Aa and praising them for their attempt, makes others want to do it too!

The themes are very cute and fun, but the core program is based on kindergarten screenings from local schools.  If our goal for the day’s lesson is patterns and the theme is dinosaurs … but it rained and all the children are talking about worms on the playground.  No one will care about dinosaurs that day.  Our educated, play-based teaching, throws the theme out and changes the theme to get lessons done.  We won’t be patterning with dinos – but maybe birds that eat worms that day…or rainbow worms! 

By paying attention to the children’s interests we can get them more engaged in our core programming and lesson.

Everyone is born with a personality.  We encourage authentic self, but we know sometimes we all need to step out of our comfort zone.  We want children to be themselves but also be able to get through the day-to-day of the big school!  This means sometimes our younger extrovert children get moved to the older group to learn self-regulation, and sometimes our older introverts get moved to the younger group to be teacher helpers.

 As educators we want all of our children to know their ABCs and 123s, but being able to survive in the pressure of schools day to day when they go to kindergarten is a bigger accomplishment.

Changing a child’s caregiver is a stressful situation for all children! At HFF we do pod teaching. 

This means the teachers in the room work the room, we do not have floaters or staff that work in many rooms.  Each teacher is in a room to give the children security and allow them to bond with the staff.  If one of your child’s teachers is off, the other staff in the room adjust their schedule to get the room covered.  Not only is this helpful for the room atmosphere, but you as the parent get to know your child’s caregivers. 

We also do a 6-week onboarding for all staff, before they are in rotation.  This allows the current staff, the children, and the parents, to get to know the staff before they are responsible for the one-on-one care.