Infant-Toddler Program

Multi-media experiences begin early, developing brains, bodies, and spirits

Identity is discovered and renewed daily in a variety of ways

Explorations include the neighborhood, around the block, and the Central Plaza, while getting sun doses of vitamin D

Visiting Artists from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music visit and play throughout the year

Building skills and awareness of their own capacities while manipulating and attaching materials

Light table activities stimulate fascinations and lead to great discoveries

The program at the Infant-Toddler Center is dedicated to exceptionally skillful and professional care, nurturing, and optimal development of young children. Teachers work with small groups of children, and each child has a primary teacher.

Each child has a Home-School Journal on the C5 Private Website that is a private channel for communicating essential information between the child’s parents and the child’s primary teacher. The C5 Private Website also has a Portfolio for each child that is accessible to the parents and the child’s extended family. The Website also has a wealth of information available to families and extended families about each child’s learning group, the Center, and the program in general.

The ratios of teachers to children at the Infant-Toddler Center is 1:3 for infants and 1:4 for toddlers. There are also support staff members who assist the teachers and the learning groups.

Our staff is highly trained, well schooled, very experienced, and meets all of the California requirements for core courses in early childhood and for Community Care Licensing. Several have Bachelors Degrees in Early Childhood Education or related fields, and some have Masters Degrees.

The same philosophy and general practices are applied at both of our centers, with adjustments for different ages, learning styles, personalities, temperament, and readiness of each child and learning group.

Our philosophical and practical influences are from the best practices around the work and include the pre-primary schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Program for Infant-Toddler Care (PITC) developed by the California Department of Education and the Western Regional Educational Labs (WestEd); Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE), founded by Magda Gerber and Tom Forrest, M.D; Richard and Patricia Schmuck’s work in Group Process and Organization Development for Schools; the constructivist, social-constructivist, and systems thinking theories of John Dewy, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, and Howard Gardner; and the comprehensive strategies and techniques of Partnership with Children and Community of Learners developed over a 30 year period by C5’s Director of Learning.

The primary emphasis is on health, safety, building effective relationships and social experiences, and supporting and facilitating optimal development of each child without getting in their way or pushing them into areas ahead of their readiness or falling behind them in our assessments or interactions with each child.

In all aspects of Infant-Toddler Center operations, we maintain the characteristics of continuously learning and improving; and, where the atmosphere is joyful, exciting, caring, aesthetic, compelling, and rich with creativity, surprises, and the promise of great potential.

Infants and toddlers experience a wide range of materials and processes as they explore their interests, fascinations, and natural inclinations for development. Examples are experiences with textures, sounds, colors, shapes, patterns, rhythms, paints, clay, water, light and shadow, drawing, body movement, gestures and sign language, music, photography, hearing stories, reading with teachers, assembling and disassembling, discovering hidden things, and working with multiple media and processes.

Parents bring in food and milk for infants. Toddlers participate in the catered lunch program and healthy snacks made by the C5 staff that are included in their tuition. Accommodations are made for children on vegetarian and other special diets.

The center has a music program that is experienced daily, with a half hour session once a week of the world famous Music Together program that is led by musical teachers on-staff who have been trained by Music Together based in Princeton, New Jersey. Families also receive three times a year a song book and CDs of the Music Together music for the current collection, as well as participate if they wish and are able in the regular weekly sessions and in classroom and community-wide sign-alongs about six times a year.

CC5 has a Creative Movement and Dance Program that was developed by C5 in concert with professional dancers and dancers on our staff. The children experience creative movement and dance daily; with a special half hour once a week of focused, graduated experiences. As in all C5 activities, parents are invited to participate.

Visiting Artists and Artists in Residence visit both C5 centers.