We are a single location program, located at 367 Hampton Street in Winnipeg, Canada. We are our Province’s (Manitoba) largest single-site Early Learning and Child Care facility and are located in a vacant School building just west of the Polo Park Shopping Centre. This has been our home since 1982.
The building is owned by the local School Division and our lease has us occupying the entire main floor of this vacant Elementary School building. This includes twelve (12) classrooms, a gymnasium, and the office space. We do share the building with another Child Care program that occupies the second floor of the building (6 classrooms). The North wing (8 classrooms) hosts most of our Preschool and our Infant programs, and the 4 classrooms in the South wing are mostly dedicated to School-age programming.
The Grounds
We have developed two areas upfront which wrap the North East corner of the building. One area we have come to know at the “Play Garden” is a natural play space on the front of Silver Avenue. It provides a wonderful opportunity for a variety of play including many natural elements for the children to experiment with including sand, water, hills, boulders, trees, a raised tree fort-like playhouse, and an area for gardening.
The second area upfront includes two large outdoor play-structures and a small area of open grass for a variety of activities that the children might choose.
Our backyard area, known as our “Adventure Playground”, is an almost exclusively natural area with many loose parts for the children to play with. Like a child recently told me, “the teachers don’t give us toys here, we use our imaginations to create our adventures”.
