La Garderie's Promise:

We promise to build a child’s self esteem by...

• Establishing realistic, achievable goals and anticipate success.
• Allowing children to explore options in different situations.
• Rejecting the child’s behavior, but never reject the child.
• Valuing each child as an individual with unique strengths, needs, interests, and skills.
• Avoiding making assumptions about a child’s behavior.
• Never criticizing a child’s questions.
• Having conversations with every child.
• Avoiding bringing up past difficulties when discussing an issue or a problem.
• Providing multiple ways for children to be successful in the classroom, program or at home.
• Emphasizing the positive aspects of their behavior or performance even if the task was not completely successful; reward direction, and not perfection.
• Encouraging children to take risks.
• Offering choices to allow children to practice decision-making skills.
• Understanding that mistakes are an inevitable (valuable) part of any learning experience; use these as an opportunity to teach and assist.
• Never, ever communicate disappointment to a child.
• Maintaining a file of child’s academic work to demonstrate his or her progress and development when he or she is feeling down.
• Never comparing one child to another.
• Leaving my personal troubles at the door.

                                              -The La Garderie Team-