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Rockridge Kids
Category:
Children's Clothing
5511 College Ave
Oakland,
California 94618
(510) 601-5437
My little cousin goes to this place and he says he enjoys it which I believe. He meet new friends...
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My little cousin goes to this place and he says he enjoys it which I believe. He meet new friends and he is more nice to people around and is not shy anymore. Its an ecellenct place to let the kids go since it has many places to play and the staff is really cool. I recommended my other family member and they also enjoy it alot too. You should all join if you live around it. Decent pricing too.
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Think of Children's Fairyland as Disneyland, except on a much smaller scale and without the big...
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Think of Children's Fairyland as Disneyland, except on a much smaller scale and without the big fancy rides and roller coasters. Fairyland is the place where a kid's favorite literary characters come to life, like the Three Little Pigs and Alice in Wonderland. All kinds of events happen there throughout the year, like puppet shows, storytime, children's theater, and more. The rides are mostly in the form of merry-go-rounds, a ferris wheel, a trolly, boat rides, etc. I went there often as a kid and had a blast there.
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This is a non-profit theater company whose goal is to stimulate children's imaginations through...
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This is a non-profit theater company whose goal is to stimulate children's imaginations through entertaining and educational performances. This group can be booked for school assemblies or private parties, and you can catch their current season at local venues including local libraries, Zeum, Bay Area Discovery Museum and local fairs and festivals. Their performances are crafted to entertain both children, their parents and their teachers and are accompanied by workshops that allow children to explore the themes of the plays.
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The teachers and staff are incredibly well-trained, have tons of experience, and often have...
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The teachers and staff are incredibly well-trained, have tons of experience, and often have massive degrees in child development and such. They put their energy into diversity, and have three really great age-appropriate rooms for kids. They have chickens and other animals around the play structures, and music, and are just really great and nice. They have sibling discounts, which is fairly common in the area but nice, and they send home really detailed reports about how the kids are doing. They even participated, with the kids, in the May 1st pro-immigrant-rights march, and participate in something called Toddlers For Peace where the kids can write postcards to legislators if they want. It's just awesome,and a very fun-looking and beautiful facility.
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Disclaimer: my son went there four or five years ago. It's possible that they have changed. I...
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Disclaimer: my son went there four or five years ago. It's possible that they have changed. I would, however, recommend grilling them at length if you even wanted to think about sending a child to this hellhole.
Here are a few of the problems we encountered.
1. They did not have a legal teacher-to-child ratio. They bulked it out with staff members who weren't teachers, who weren't supervising the kids - so they could be like "Look! We have two adults in this room of twenty children!" or whatever - while one of the adults was just cleaning up and not paying any attention to the kids and had no training around kids.
2. Because of the crappy teacher-to-child ratio, there was no supervision - sometimes literally. When the kids were out playing, that meant that there was intense and rampant bullying -- even among three-year-olds!! The teachers and staff members would hang out in the shade at the edge of the play area, while the kids were all the way out on the play structure in the middle.
3. By "sometimes literally," I mean that I frequently found children sitting in a corner of the lobby area, with no adults in sight. It turned out that that was one way that they did "time out" - to send preschoolers to sit by themselves at an end of the building that was otherwise totally abandoned.
4. For that matter, when our son first started going there, there was so little supervision that we could drop him off at his classroom, and leave, and he could run back out to the lobby all alone and cry and cry about being alone, and the teachers wouldn't even notice that he had been dropped off, much less that he had disappeared. And they treated this situation like he was acting out, and related it to us as if we and our son had done something wrong.
5. The bullying and lack of supervision created a vicious cycle where kids would beat up our son (in preschool!) who wouldn't fight back because we had told him not to hit, and who would go to the teachers for help, and then the teachers would say right to his face that since they hadn't seen what happened they didn't know who to believe, and would put him and the other child in time out.
6. If our son tried to escape from time out, the teachers would GRAB HIM BY THE EAR and PULL him back into time out. When we found this out, we took him out of the school immediately.
7. Before we found out about the ear-pulling, he had already told us that the head teacher, Ms. Lee, yelled at them and hit their arms. When I talked to her about this, she lied to my face, and said things that were obviously beating around the bush like "We're not allowed to hit kids because it's against the law. The only time we would ever use a physical intervention with a child...." Now, come on. And also, "the only time" they would do that, according to her, was if that was "the only thing that child would listen to." And the example she gave was if a kid took another kid's toy. Yeah, that's worthy of smacking them. That's seriously abusive thinking - that there's ever a child who won't listen to anything but violence. Funny, the next preschool he went to (Growing Light Montessori) never seemed to have that problem with kids. Maybe that's because they cared enough to pay attention to the children.
8. Besides the physical bullying by teachers and children, our son was also made fun of for "liking girl things." Whether it was a light blue Tweety Bird shirt or a pink PowerPuff Girls backpack, he would be followed around and teased and mocked by the kids there. I didn't know about this until I saw it happen; it turned out that the head teacher totally knew about it, and wasn't doing anything. When I talked to her about it, she acknowledged it and said that she would take care of it, and waited until a day when all the kids were there and talked to them all about how there's no such thing as a girl color or a boy color, which had zero effect and was too little too late.
There are more, like the way they intentionally push the children to read which makes the ones who aren't reading yet feel horrible, the way that they lie and are rude to anyone who they don't know is a family member, the way that they refused to support us in potty-training him - like, we would be potty-training him at home, and then he would go there in underwear and come back in some other child's Pull-Ups because they insisted that he wasn't ready to be potty-trained solely because he wouldn't go to the bathroom on their command... But this should be enough for any parent.
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