Spanish For Fun Academy

My daughter started SFFA at age 1, and is now 2. The facilities are clean and colorful, but they are admittedly not fancy. We saw one or two prettier daycares, but I realized that my aesthetic preferences and those of my toddler are not the same. Our most important criteria were loving caregivers and convenient location, and SFFA has both. SFFA also has long hours and provides breakfast, lunch, and a snack, which the next nearest-​to-​UNC daycare, a Montessori Academy, does not. There is also more flexibility. Our daughter goes MWF, but in an emergency they were happy to let us pay a daily fee to drop her off on a Tuesday. All this plus Spanish immersion made SFFA our clear preference.
I am docking a star for the truly terrible parking lot. They are working on a solution, but in the meantime it must be said that pickup/​drop off is always annoying and is sometimes scary.
I want to respond to a commenter who criticized the lack of curriculum at SFF. Current early childhood education and child development research has come to the consensus that unstructured play is best for preschoolers. Early introduction of desk work does not improve later school performance, but actually harms it; trying to teach reading early is correlated with short term gains followed by longer term *deficits* in reading skills. At age 2, children should be given a varied, stimulating environment that they are allowed to explore with a caring adult near by who uses complex language to discuss the world and read with the child. That is what I see happening at SFFA. My daughter’s room has dress up, play kitchen, dolls and wheeled toys, building toys and puzzles, art materials, etc. They also send home her big portfolio of artwork a couple of times a year. She plays the way we do at home (plus what we would do if I didn’t have to clean up afterward!). The outdoors play area is phenomenal. My two year old can run, jump, climb, and gallop like an older child (and has for months), I believe in large part because she plays outside with bigger kids every day. Her Spanish language is exploding right now (we are a bilingual family), and she loves her classmates and caretakers and talks about them when we are at home. She loves SFFA, and we do too!

My 2yo son was at SFF for a month after we moved to NC from OH. We decided to look for a new daycare for him the first week he was in SFF. I gave them 3 stars instead of 2 because the teachers were so caring for him. I think that if you have never experienced other daycares before and your child is not as high-​energy as my youngest, then SFF might be okay for you. The daycare my son had in OH was outstanding, so I think in contrast SFF had some room for improvement. Here are my thoughts regarding pros and cons.
Pro
— Obviously your child learns Spanish, which has a plethora of benefits.
— The teachers are very caring and they put him with a bi-​lingual primary teacher since he just speaks English, as do my husband and I.
— There is a diverse socioeconomic range of students/​families. I value this because I worry about my kids being around only affluent people living in Chapel Hill.
Cons
— As one of the other reviewers said, they have them in a small room most of the day. There is a huge garden area for them to play, but they essentially have no play equipment other than some bikes. They have a small playset, but it is taped off and can not be used. So what I observed with my son while he was there was basically him just milling around. He could have dug in dirt and climbed on the stage, but most of the time he was just wandering around aimlessly because there were so many kids he couldn’t really run– and he loves to run!
— In the classroom it seemed like a lot of free play. Which is important, but in the entire time he was there, my son never produced any artwork except a cup for father’s day. At his other daycare he was daily coloring, painting or doing art projects, which he loves. I saw the teacher read once to small group of students, but other than that, I just see my son milling around when I look in the room before I pick him up. I am not sure they have any sort of curriculum. This is really why I looked elsewhere for care. If my son is not busy and bored most of the day, it is impossible to wear him down as night. We’ll take him to the park and play/​interact with him at home, but he has so much physical and intellectual energy (e.g. needs to paint, needs to build something or be stimulated in some fashion) that it is crippling when you are trying to do things like make dinner, clean up around the house or interact with my other son because my 2yo will just breakdown (and we are not push overs). At his OH daycare we had a teacher who was only there for a short time who did no activities with him and he had the same behavior as he did while he was at SFF. This is fairly specific to my son, although I think it is not uncommon for young kids, and especially boys to be this high energy.
— My son had a black eye that I noticed on pick up. It was difficult to identify what happened and I am used to the other daycare that filed an incident report anytime a child was hit in the head or had a significant injury.
— With other the OH daycare they have a daily sheet that discusses things like what they did that day or how they ate (e.g. ate everything, some…). SFF does not have this and it made it difficult to understand what if anything my son was doing in the day and if he was just really hungry (which he ALWAYS was when I picked him up) or didn’t like his lunch that day.
— The parking and just getting in and out of the center is difficult. There are not enough spaces after the staff parks and usually only the handicap spaces are free. They need to repair their parking area.
Overall, we really liked the immersion and a lot of the benefits of the center, but these benefits were not really enough to have our son mill around all day. It just didn’t work for us.

Who wouldn’t want their kid to learn Spanish and receive childcare at the same time?
Spanish for Fun Academy is one of a couple spanish immersion daycares in the area. The staff are all native spanish speakers who provide childcare for babies to pre-​K at their building conveniently located near UNC on S Columbia (hours 7:30 — 5:30 M-​F).
My child has been going here for over a year and has been picking up spanish fairly quickly. It is like having eight hours of spanish lessons every day. It also seems to be a good sign that many of the parents who bring their children here have been doing so since they were babies. Not a lot of turnover. The teachers are all very friendly and loving and speak enough english to communicate with all the non-​spanish speaking parents.
While the actual classroom spaces are somewhat small (hence only four stars), there is a very large fenced play area in back (el parque) where the kids go to romp and play once or twice a day when it isn’t raining. Typically they’d be outside 4:00 — 5:30 in the afternoon. Quite frequently if I happen to show up for pickup on the early side, I’ll end up waiting a while because the kids don’t want to stop playing with each other.