Gilden Woods Early Care & Preschool

Our family has had such a wonderful experience at Gilden Woods in Okemos! From the very beginning, we felt welcomed and supported by the entire staff. The teachers are absolutely amazing — they’re warm, patient, and truly invested in each child’s growth and happiness. Our toddler has thrived here, both socially and academically. The curriculum is thoughtfully designed, balancing play-based learning with structured activities that keep the kids engaged and curious. We’ve seen so much development in language, independence, and confidence since starting. Communication from the teachers is also excellent — we love the daily updates and photos that help us stay connected to what our child is learning each day. The classrooms are bright, clean, and full of age-appropriate materials that make learning fun. It’s clear that the staff care deeply about creating a safe, nurturing environment where every child can succeed. We couldn’t be happier with our experience at Gilden Woods Okemos and are so grateful for the teachers who make such a positive impact on our little one’s life every day. Highly recommend this center to any family looking for quality early childhood education!

The Administrative staff is always friendly and helpful if needed. The teachers and assistants are caring and work well with the children.

I can only speak to our experience with the Infant Room. Shortly, it was horrible. Longer story. This center is highly unorganized and borderline unsafe. 1. Babies are left unattended in distress, wailing and crying for long stretches of time (not just for a few minutes, which would have been understandable). 2. Babies are placed in containers for long stretches of time. And they can’t even use the containers safely! 
Our baby was put into this half-circle couch, which sits in a larger circle. She was trapped between the couch and the larger circle, using a stack of blocks to prevent her from moving. The problem is that she got stuck as she slipped down, with her chin stuck to her chest. She tried to get out, cried, and wailed, but not a single adult who walked by stopped to help her. She was stuck like that for 30 minutes until we came to pick her up early, noticing all these alarming issues on camera. 3. Before picking her up, we contacted them twice, asking about her, sharing the problems we noticed, and offering solutions. Her teacher sent one passive-aggressive message, telling us to just look at the cameras and wait for diaper/feed/sleep updates to appear on the app, which wasn’t even the issue we were concerned about. Our second attempt to contact them through the app never received a response. 4. The cameras have blind spots, which seem to be exploited. The kids who keep crying for an hour are removed from camera view. When we asked their administration about this, we were told that the kids were being placed in some corner(?) and that they were fine there. No explanation as to what they were even doing there or why they were taken there. Please feel free to draw your own conclusions from this. 5. Babies are not played with or interacted with. Caregivers seem to approach babies only to change/feed them or take a picture for their parents. They are ignored outside of that. 6. There is no curriculum, no plan, pure chaos. There is no attempt to promote the kids’ development. We knew this going in, but we were in a difficult position and urgently needed childcare. We did not know that this place was unsafe. 7. Hygiene was questionable at best. If this daycare ends up replying to our review, know that we brought up the major problems with them a few times, and they reacted with shrugs and dismissals. This only tells us that they are not only aware of the problems but will not do anything about them. Needless to say, our baby will not go there. If you have a small kid, please avoid this place.

We started taking our infant son here in September. We are very impressed! It’s evident how much they love and care for him. We have the opportunity to talk with the teachers throughout the day, get real time updates and can even watch him in the classroom on livestream. They have partnered with us on any request and even helped us nurture and encourage milestones! They enrich him with activities and send us photos of him doing them. We are really happy with our choice and cannot say enough good things about choosing them for our baby.

We started taking our infant son, Lennox, here in March, and are so impressed. It’s not easy leaving your new baby with strangers, but quickly I realized how much his teachers truly loved & cared for him. They are so loving, patient, and kind with him. I can tell he is very comfortable there thanks to his amazing teachers. Definitely recommend.