Our Program: SMART Playgroups

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Our playgroups are designed for the one year old who is quickly discovering their world. Lessons are designed to promote cognitive skills of children in this age group that impact overall learning. For example:

To help develop important cognitive skills such as memory and concentration, we play games involving hiding and finding objects. This is a fun way to help children understand their surroundings and learn about object permanence at the same time.

To encourage imagination we model how one object, such as a wooden block, can be another, like a phone, with simple physical substitutions. Children actively participate in a variety of sensory experiences such as touching different textures or playing musical instruments.

Reasoning and problem-solving skills are cultivated during play. When a challenge occurs, such as a shape that won’t fit into the hole of a toy, we encourage and guide children to work through the task in a different way and try again.

NALA teachers show interest in the children’s play and follow their lead. They provide opportunities to explore and play with interesting and challenging materials, such as blocks, simple puzzles, water and sand play, and nesting toys that encourage children to manipulate, interact, or figure something out; the focus is on the process of play and not on the final product.

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Simply listening to music will help your toddler think and express herself more creatively, a skill that’s sure to help your little one later in school. But one-year-olds can recognize different qualities in music, and respond with their whole bodies to rhythm, beat and melody-- toddlers love to dance!

There is a good reason to encourage toddler dancing: dancing improves toddlers’ coordination and gives them an appreciation of how their bodies fit into their surroundings. Movement builds large muscles and improves balance. At the same time, the motor pathways in the brain and spinal cord are getting better at controlling and coordinating the movements needed for walking and later running, skipping and jumping.

NALA instructors take advantage of opportunities to get your child bouncing, marching, and tapping to the beat of music. Their enthusiasm is contagious and you will soon notice your child copying their every moves and expressions. It is exciting to see your baby grow and learn to really love the music and songs.

In our SMART Babies group, babies naturally respond to music by smiling, swaying, and even clapping their hands. Some babble in a sing-song way. Dancing at this age involves bobbing up and down with feet planted on the floor. We encourage even further interaction through songs with motions that parents and children can enjoy together, such as Skidamarink or This Little Piggy.

Our SMART Kiddies group encourages children to respond to music with full body movements. Dancing for the almost two year old involves moving from side to side and turning in circles, sometimes with her arms moving around. Children at this age enjoy making their own music and playing with musical instruments. We encourage this by marching around the room and making music with bells, drums and other rhythm instruments.

At NALA, parents and children experience the joy of music and movement together. Toddlers strengthen gross motor skills such as balance and gain better control and coordination of their movements, which are important for walking.

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When your toddler express preferences for colors, shapes, sounds, tastes or textures, he is making aesthetic choices. Long before children can talk, their responses to shapes, sounds, and other sensations around them establish their styles of interacting with the world, because every young child expresses awareness and preferences about the world in different ways. While one toddler sways rhythmically to music in a television commercial or a song on the radio, another wants to look at a certain visual image in a picture book.

Aesthetic experiences can enhance cultural sensitivity, promote language development, and improve the quality of young children's own art making. An aesthetic education will lead to the ability to appreciate artistic elements such as visual art, music, the performing arts, people and eventually the world. Further, aesthetic experiences develop visual perception, critical thinking, language and problem solving. Nurturing these skills will be beneficial to your child now and in later stages of development as he prepares for formal schooling.

At NALA, we know young children are capable of aesthetically responding to various forms of art, and we provide the opportunities for aesthetic development to occur. We plan opportunities for you and your child to have both informal and formal encounters with art. By creating experiences that reflect the unique learning style of toddlers, we develop visual discrimination skills while at the same time cultivating a sense of appreciation for great art works.

Our SMART Kiddies and SMART Babies programs offer wonderful opportunities for aesthetic experiences. For example, through beautiful picture books, our teachers might facilitate viewing the illustrations as narratives of the story, since pictures communicate a great deal. Your child might be invited to pose like a sculpture of a ballerina or look at a painting and imitate sounds that they might hear in it. NALA provides your child with exposure to fine art and opportunities to discuss art and beauty with thoughtful adults.

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You are your child’s most important first teacher, and at NALA our teachers respect the unconditional love and the deep connection you have with your child. Through our rich, nurturing environment we encourage further bonding and social interaction with your little one. Our SMART Babies and SMART Kiddies play groups help you establish emotional connections based on trust and intimacy. We strengthen the bond between parent and child and stimulate early language, cognitive, and social development. We nurture relationship building skills through activities that help you show a sincere interest in your child, providing uninterrupted time together.

NALA playgroups provide the opportunities your child needs to play and work with other children, which is so important for social and emotional development. Through relationships at NALA, your child will discover who they are and learn to understand others. Social time for your child at this age is as much a laboratory for experimentation and learning as it is a fun time to push toys around the room with a friend. Your 18-month-old baby may shriek with delight when he sees a familiar friend in class. When your little one attends a NALA playgroup, he learns from what another child does, observes how he does it, and takes note of how the other child's actions impact the environment in which they play.

When problems arise, such as frustration over sharing toys, we model how to help your child work through this and sort through their feelings. We praise appropriate behavior and set limits consistently.

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The best time to teach your child a second language is the same time she's learning her first one. NALA has a solid trilingual curriculum that is the foundation of our SMART Babies and SMART Kiddies play groups. Research shows the earlier you introduce a second language, the easier it will be for your child to pick up its unique sounds. And you know how important it is to be multi-lingual in today’s global world! The ability to hear different phonetic pronunciations is sharpest before age 3, since humans lose the capacity to hear and produce certain sounds if we aren't exposed to them early.

Multi-lingualism has many benefits for the development of your child’s growing brain. A number of studies suggest multi-lingualism improves the command system in the brain, the parts your child uses for planning, solving problems and performing a variety of mentally demanding tasks. Children who speak more than one language tend to be more creative thinkers, are better at focusing attention on relevant information and ignoring unnecessary distractions, understand math concepts and solve word problems more easily and have an easier time mastering languages throughout life.

We know this at NALA and provide a casual, fun trilingual environment for babies to learn Mandarin, English and Cantonese through silly songs, games, storytelling and other activities in our SMART Babies and SMART Kiddies groups. We know the best way for a baby to learn to understand a new language is for him to hear people speaking it fluently. Since babies love to mimic what they hear, soon they'll begin to understand the meanings of short words and phrases from our native English and Mandarin teachers. NALA teachers know the right balance for your child to learn multiple languages, and we integrate it into everyday routines and interactions. At NALA, language learning is the foundation of our program.