Smart Start Learning Center

Smart Start is a great place to send your pre-​school child!!! Teacher Maru is great at preparing children to enter kindergarten and she has great assistants to help her along each day.
There is plenty of interaction both in the classroom and outside, the children have toys to play with along with a rapidly growing goat population (behind a fence of course).
Highly recommended!!!

We love Smart Start! My daughter (who is now in 1^st Grade) was one of the first students here after they opened. My son who is 5 currently attends and has since he was 2.5 yrs. Teacher Maru, Teacher Sara, and Teacher Shannon are one of the BEST teams you could hope for to nurture your child (ren) as they learn and grow.
Smart Start definitely has a lot of learning through play, which is how my kids learned best. I realize that this may not be the best fit for all children, but you’d be amazed at how much can be taught by the techniques used here. My children were/​are absolutely socially and academically ready to start school after being at Smart Start.
I really like that they take the time to make each child feel welcome and to spend time with each child individually and in group learning during the day. Each teacher is very good about defusing difficult situations and behaviors (which WILL happen with preschoolers, since they’re developing socially as well) and they take care to make sure that even when disciplining children that the child knows why they’ve been disciplined and learns something as a result.
The school is located in an old house, which Teacher Maru bought for the sole purpose of having a preschool located there. They have a HUGE yard/​play area, with a beautiful orange tree, mulberry tree, and grapevines. The kids love to play out there and there are lots of learning experiences from gardening to learning about insects! In the spring there are tons of ladybugs!
Highly recommended!

My kids have attended this preschool program M-​F, from 8:30-noon for over a year. Each morning, my children are excited to go to school — an enthusiasm I believe is so important to nurture as the transition to public school approaches. Their eagerness is a direct result of the quality of the time and attention they receive by Director/​Teacher Maru and her wonderful team. The techniques used in speaking to the children are subtle, but successful in their simplicity — as parents, we could ALL take lessons from these instructors in how to better handle our children. My kids have been effectively taught how to «use their words» to voice their feelings — and it doesn’t hurt that, at the same time, being encouraged to speak their thoughts aloud reenforces the behavioral lesson behind the conversation — that we don’t stand on chairs, we don’t push, etc. Taken as a whole, spending time in this environment has served to teach them numerous lessons about self-​regulation, independence, teamwork, sharing, and self-expression.he academic curriculum and the quality of the educational material provided to my kids has been nothing less than top-​notch. Their daily routine (which is a regular schedule including art-​time, story-​time, snack-​time, circle-​time, outdoor-​time, etc.), utilizes a multi-​sensory approach and involves the children directly in fun ways to discover and learn these skills. Among many things, my kids are now intimately familiar with the days of the week and the months of the year, shapes, colors, the alphabet (including the sounds of all the letters), numbers, opposites, occupations, body parts, animals, emotions, seasons and weather… the list goes on and on.
A priority for me was placing my kids in a program valuing self-​reliance, so that they could begin to learn (and be required) to take care of their own needs away from my care. This independent behavior is reinforced at the school, including bringing and being responsible for their own lunches, feeding themselves with appropriate table manners, washing hands, putting on their own shoes, jackets, etc. They will pour their own drink of water, or clean up after their own messes. These expectations are appropriate and necessary for their overall development, and are similar to what I require of them at home, which results in consistency for my kids — whether they are with me or at school. Another priority for me was safety and security, and finding a pleasant, cheerful environment for my kids to spend their time, since they would be at school so often. Pulling up to Smart Start the first time, I instantly felt comfortable there. The parking lot was sufficient and appropriate for the size of the school, and the huge fence and locked gate was instantly reassuring.
Outdoors is awesome — a nice, clean, safe big yard, with outdoor tables, a nice lawn area, an awesome play structure, a good-​sized sandbox (which is kept clean and covered), huge shady trees and plants, grapevines (and a garden this year). Besides structured activities, they spend time getting to run around and play frisbee, throw/​kick/​catch balls, work on balance, play hopscotch, blow bubbles, use chalk, invent uses for things and create games to play, etc… and my kids also get a huge kick out of the school pets, the goats who reside behind the back fence. Indoors, I can’t say enough about the quality of the atmosphere; clean, bright, colorful, with designated areas for the many typical activities one might expect in a preschool (blocks, dressup, books, a listening station, puzzles, a sensory station, art projects, etc.) I remember being struck by the theory (which hadn’t occurred to me before then, but now I so appreciate) of «unplugged» play. Whereas so many of the toys on today’s market are battery-​operated and don’t require much active participation from the child, everything in the school is geared to be kid-​directed for feedback (an old-​school ideal!)
Maru engages the parents to participate in the preschool experience she provides, arranging throughout the year a variety of family events, celebrations and field trips, and we have come to know many of the other Smart Start families. In fact, all of the kids at school know who all of the parents are, and this familiarity is extremely comforting when you are leaving your child in somebody else’s care. Maru has been excellent about communicating when it comes to my kids and their progress. Notwithstanding all the wonderful games, songs, activities, books, art projects, theme days, special visitors, etc. (which are all creating special memories for my kids and our family), I feel that my children are receiving an invaluable comprehensive education of knowledge, skills and interpersonal values when they are at preschool. Maru and her teachers are genuine, patient, intuitive, kind, supportive, open, and they truly care about how my children progress and thrive.