Visit Our Rooms
In January 2020, we changed our name from Wild Rose Montessori Child Care to The Nurture Tree to reflect our change in programming. While we still follow the Montessori philosophy of early childhood education, we have taken a more nature-based, play-based approach to developing activities, rather than the exclusive Montessori apparatus. We have brought in more open-ended, loose parts, sensory, curious, and authentic items to offer a tranquil and calm environment for children to become engaged in deep levels of sustained thinking. This environment is breakable as it teaches children to be respectful, calm, and to take care of their play items. It promotes more refined motor skills to be careful not to break the pretty things.
The rooms have smaller class sizes to ensure effective supervision and to create a family-like environment.
To learn more about placement in our programs, please send us a message or contact us.
Mountain Room
Our youngest members, ages 6 months-24 months, have a spacious room with an outdoors theme. With soft grey tones, there is a mountain mural with silhouettes of trees and bear cubs around the room. The furniture is sized for the smallest of our families, and playthings are at their height for easy reach to help build their motor skills, balance, confidence and self-esteem. The simple routines and schedule in The Mountain Room follow the needs of each child in the room. Following guidance from parents, we build routines for each child.
The playthings in the Mountain Room are familiar items that can be found in the home, but are arranged to build on sensory development, motor skills, discovery and interest, and to meet the children’s ever developing curiosity. We encourage language development through story reading and songs, and naming what the children do throughout the day. Outdoor play is important in the healthy routines we plan for the infants, and they love being with the older children as they go for wagon rides or play in the sandbox or play under the trees.
There is no large adult furniture in the room besides a comfy chair for cuddling your little ones, which encourages the educators to get to the level of the children and play on the floor with them.
Almost everyone loves the Mountain Room – its where the babies are.
Garden Room
Our toddlers, ages 2 years – 3 years, have a large bright room with a garden theme. Flowers, plants, small animals and friendly insects are found in amongst the activities in the Garden Room. With a casual daily routine, the toddlers at The Nurture Tree have the freedom to roam around the room choosing what they’d like to play with for as long as they would like. The activities are built following the children’s interests and ability. Literacy is promoted through read aloud stories, story-bags for the children to retell in their own words and with the introduction of phonetic letter sounds. STEM activities are prevalent through the whole room encouraging the children to explore with loose parts and items found within the home.
The Garden Room has a little hum as the toddlers chatter and talk as they play.
Forest Room
The Forest Room home for the older more capable 3 years – 4-year-old children. The Forest Room has a feeling of the quiet outdoors with a green mountain mural with silhouettes of majestic pine trees. Deer, moose, foxes, and wolves are watchful around the room and placed in little areas for the children to find and play with. Here the children already know the routines and are quite a bit more independent and imaginative. The Educators in the Forest Room closely observe and follow the children’s interest and build an emergent curriculum and activities that are inviting, engaging and challenging.
Unique, curious, and interesting nature-based and household items are used in the classroom to promote creative arts, fine motor skills, and to encourage the children to explore new ways of using old things. Literacy, math, science and creative expression is incorporated within the development of all activities. Books, story-bags, and other literary materials are placed throughout the room for the children’s enjoyment. Math and science are taught through STEM activities with the loose parts baskets throughout the room.
Just like the forest, The Forest Room has a certain peace about it as the children are actively engaged in what interests them.
Ocean Room
The Ocean room has a lovely, beach theme with seashells, fish and large ocean animals displayed for the children to use in their play. The Ocean Room is for our more mature children who are older or who have been in our place for several years. There is a focus on academics, more refined and advanced literacy and math activities. The children make more decisions about their own work and activities and the Educators are skilled in guiding the children’s work and following their interests. They create elaborate displays that defy gravity and show great knowledge of physics and engineering for their young age. They show more compassion for their friends, and concern and care for the environment. They make little books and charts of the interesting things they learn and discover.
In the outdoors, they engage in risky play under the careful observation of the Educators, developing their gross motor skills. They are pirates, or paleontologists, digging for buried treasures in the large, covered sand box, they observe the insects and animals that visit the back yard. They tend to the garden that they cultivated and planted. They cared for the chickens that spend the summer with us, feeding and gathering eggs.
Just as the ocean, these mighty learners show us that they truly are a powerful force.