Little Tree Bilingual Montessori

Both of my daughters had their preschool here. We moved from Arizona, where my older one had already 1.5yrs pre-school experiences before moved in, where she was in English only place; the younger one start right from here. The reason I choose this school: 1. Close to my work place and my home. 2. Bilingual. They teach Chinese and English. For kids from Chinese family, this is a easier start point. 3. Each room is large enough for kids to play, and they have a large outdoor play area as well. 4. Tuition is reasonable as compared those really expensive ones. You know what I mean if you are in this area. There are five rooms for different ages. Each room come with 2 teachers. One Chinese and one English teacher. Here is what I observed: 1. Language development: Most of the kids are from Chinese families. For those parents who want kids to continue develop Chinese skills, this is a good place to start. As the kids here speak mostly in Chinese as well. However, the English language development might be behind other kids at their age—though this is not really a concern as kids pick up things quickly. 2. Leaning: They do learn a lot from the school, especially in pre-K class. They teach even more than what K does in public school. 3. Schedule: class hrs are 9-6pm. All rooms have mandatory 1-3pm nap time. My daughters struggled on that, as they don’t nap anymore since 4yrs. In which case they still had to stay in the beds. 4. Understand their policies to avoid surprises.

I had my daughter in Little Tree for 1.5 years, starting in Room 3 with Miss Mercy & Miss Lily, then Room 1 with Miss Ola and Miss Jana. The switch from inhome daycare to preschool was pretty stressful for me but apparently this is good practice for kindergarten and beyond for the kiddos. It's a big change for the kids too, but with that comes a lot of opportunities. There's a try out interview for a reason -- there tends to be a decent amount of structure and worksheets which took some getting used to, but ultimately got my daughter to learn better focus skills. Miss Mercy really ignited my daughter's interest in art and magic (she now calls many things "magical" and it is a delight), Miss Lily was always so kind with her persona and patience. My daughter begged me to get her teachers to come to her bday, and Miss Mercy stopped by and made her and every child there feel special. It was beyond and so kind. For Room 1, we had to leave early -- only 5 months in :( But in that time I saw incredible leaps in her development. We've been trying to teach our daughter to read for literally a year, but since joining Miss Ola's class, she basically has learned everything we've been trying to teach her. In fact, she started schooling my husband and pointing out certain phonetics as "digraphs" which we both had to Google and figure out what that meant. I'm sure some of this has to do with her age and development, but even in the back to school nights I really noticed the care and diligent observation from the teachers that really catered to her learning style and focused on kindness / being a helper. Chinese with Miss Jana has been great as well. Since joining Little Tree, I feel secure at family reunions knowing that elders will be happy with my children's Chinese even though I personally don't speak the language. I will also note that the front desk woman, Bai, has been an immense help in making sure I was organized and in sync with all the events of the school. I also loved how every morning she would call out "Good morning [my child's name]!" to my daughter very directly and warmly from the admin office. It gave her a sense every morning from the start that she was mattered and she belonged. It's a busy place with a lot of working parents, but the teachers are phenomenal, the location is amazing, and it is getting better all the time. Specifically, hours have shifted from 9 AM start to now 8:15 AM to accommodate parents with other kids in school. Also, early on I missed certain deadlines for events and then they started posting deadlines at check in / check out so I never missed a deadline again :) Lastly, I'll mention the extracurriculars & food are both wonderful and reasonably priced! Compared to art classes at art centers they're about 1/3 of the cost and my daughter really enjoyed them. The food they offer is Chinese which is a nice touch. Having a bilingual preschool was a hopeful turnkey to linking my kids to their heritage, and having authentic Chinese food has been a wonderful add-on. Growing up I had a really bad experience in preschool and I'm just thankful I survived. As a parent I feel like placing my child here I did one thing right to give my daughter the chance to securely explore and discover who she is. When we left we got a preliminary compilation of the graduation book of various creations from our daughter and our own wishes from the experience. It brought a tear to my eye to see how we all changed and developed from the experience. I never get used to how quick the time goes and how much changes, even in just 1.5 years <3

Awesome school. Great teachers and solid program for the kids