Tutor Time child-care provider
Tutor Time child-care provider
Ingrid's little boy was growing fast. Soon he would have to go to preschool. She started looking around for a good one. Ingrid found many schools in Jakarta but none that really satisfied her expectations.
Reluctantly she put her son in one but without feeling good about doing so.
While on a holiday in the U.S., Ingrid made a chance visit to Tutor Time, the child-care provider for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This was it! She wanted her son to have his first learning experience in a place like Tutor Time.
What really impressed Ingrid was the cheerful atmosphere of the place.
She found the facilities painted in bright colors.
She was even more happy to see how concerned the school was with the safety and security of its toddlers.
Safety
Parents could enter the center only by using a special code that opened the entrance door, and it was impossible for them to exit with their child without entering the same code.
Television monitors were installed in every classroom to enable parents to watch their children from the reception area without disturbing classroom activities.
Inside the center she found an area called the Village, a large two-storeyed structure resembling a little town used by the school to develop the creativity, imagination and socialization skills of the children.
She found the two playgrounds, one for preschoolers and the other for toddlers, spacious and safe.
Ingrid was so inspired that she returned to Jakarta determined to establish a similar kind of preschool.
That was five years ago.
Facilities
By the time she found the means and facilities to open the first franchised Tutor Time center in Kemang in 1996, her son had already graduated from preschool.
However, hundreds of others, both Indonesian and expatriate tiny tots between the ages of one year and five years, are using the center in Kemang and the Kelapa Gading areas.
It includes all the above facilities along with self-contained classrooms with attached toilets and diaper-changing counters, not to mention a computer lab, music and movement room, art, math and language corners.
Award
U.S. Tutor Time Directors visit and evaluate all Tutor Time centers every year. Both Tutor Time Kemang and Kelapa Gading received the Award of Excellence for two consecutive years, in 1999 and 2000. Evaluation based on total performance of the scholl.
The Award of Excellence is given to all centers that have scored above 90 percent. Both Tutor Time Kemang and Kelapa Gading scored 99% for the past two years.
Five-year-old Justine is one of the senior students at Kemang's Tutor Time. His favorite place at the school has always been the Tumble Room where he can travel in and out of gigantic plastic tubes that are painted in the different colors of the rainbow.
Blue-eyed Justine loves to come to school every day because the teachers tell him tales about sharks.
It was discovered that the theme of the week when The Jakarta Post visited the school was all about life below the ocean.
Morgan, four, loves the Village and likes to stand on duty at the fire station.
He uses the post office to send off letters and visits the grocery store whenever he feels like buying himself his favorite snack.
Doe-eyed Ayesha, four, returned to Jakarta recently from Thailand.
Although she is an Indonesian child she insists that she is Thai.
"I like to come to school because I have friends here," she said while Australian Hannah, also four years old, shows up every day simply because she can play so much.
Rohan who is in his last year at the preschool looked forward to going to a big children's school soon.
In the meantime he was busy fastening a helmet securely on his head as he still had a lot of unfinished business to do before the school day ended.
Curriculum
"Monthly curriculum for each age group are prepared by Tutot Time's Curriculum Department in Florida and mailed to all of its 200 centerd around the world, inlcuding Jakarta.
The curriculum is a combination of traditional, progressive and Montessori teaching methods taught by teachers trained by visiting staff from the headquarters in Florida," explained Melania Hamdan, center director of Tutor Time, Kemang.
The result is a center full of happy, smiling faces -- both children and teachers -- which is no mean achievement if little ones are to cherish for the rest of their lives positive memories of their earliest years of learning.