Innovative Programs for
Your Beloved Children

Nido / Infant: Care That Feels Like Family

Everything in an infant room begins with a simple truth: a baby’s first curriculum is love. Long before letters or numbers mean anything, infants are learning whether the world is a safe and warm place — and they learn it from the arms that hold them. At home, that love and affection comes from family. At school, it has to come from caregivers who give it just as freely and just as naturally — someone who notices the difference between a hungry cry and a tired one, who celebrates a first roll-over like it’s front-page news, and who rocks your baby with the same patience you would.

That is why we believe the single most important thing in any infant program is not the equipment or even the classroom — it is the caring teacher. And it’s why we are so proud that both of our infant teachers have been with Creative Minds since the school first opened its doors, more than ten years ago. In an industry where caregivers often change every few months, our families see the same two warm faces at drop-off year after year — teachers who have soothed hundreds of babies through first teeth and first steps, and who often welcome a family’s second and third child into the very same room.

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CASA: Montessori Rigor, Ready for Kindergarten — and Beyond

In the CASA years, our teachers focus on a careful blend: the rigor of authentic Montessori work on one side, and concrete kindergarten readiness on the other. Children move through the Montessori language and math sequences at their own pace — sandpaper letters to phonetic reading, golden beads to real four-digit arithmetic — so that reading, writing, and math are not subjects they’ve been drilled on but skills they own. Our goal is that every child walks into kindergarten not just ready, but ahead and, more importantly, in love with learning.

But a well-developed child is more than an academic checklist, so the CASA week is deliberately rounded out. Yoga builds flexibility, balance, and a habit of calm focus that will serve them for a lifetime — few gifts last longer than a body and mind that know how to settle. Music lessons feed curiosity, training little ears to listen closely and ask “what happens if…?” And PE and soccer turn learning active: coordination, teamwork, taking turns, losing gracefully, and trying again. Academics, body, and character — developed together, wholistically.

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The Research Behind Our Programs

Every program on this page stands on a century of research into how young children actually learn — and we’ve done the reading so you don’t have to take our word for it. Our Research Series holds twenty research papers on the world’s great teaching methodologies, from Montessori and Reggio Emilia to HighScope, forest schools, and traditions as old as ancient Greece.

Each paper traces where a method came from and weighs what the peer-reviewed evidence actually shows — including where the evidence is thin or contested. Every claim is sourced, and every source is linked, so you can follow any finding back to the original study. It’s the honest foundation beneath our blend of Montessori structure and Waldorf-inspired art, music, and movement. If you’ve ever wondered whether play-based learning really works, the answers — with citations — are all there. And if you’d rather start with the plain-English version, our guide Early Childhood Education Methodologies walks through all twenty approaches in a few friendly minutes — where each came from, who shaped it, and what it believes about children.