Information about a Multi-Age Family Licensed Child Care operating as a Preschool:

• In the whole Twin Cities Area, we only take 12 children (2 of which can be 5 and older, two of which can be between 12 months-23 months old).

• Age Groups getting ready for Kindergarten (the year before) can change due to summer birthdays and what parents decide to do.  Some parents wait a year while others don’t.

• An age range in a class* of children can be as big as 15 months depending on if we have a child that is waiting an extra year to go to kindergarten.

• In some cases, a child might miss a kindergarten cutoff date by a couple of weeks to a month. The age difference from one class* of children to another class* might only be a couple of weeks.  The child with the summer birthday goes to Kindergarten while the child with the September birthday missed the cut off.

As you can see, there are a lot of scenarios that can happen with the ages at Turtle Tales.  When the children are together at Turtle Tales, they are playing together in many different age combinations.  They don’t see gender and age the way adults do, which is why we have decided the multi age preschool works for what we believe in.

Depending on who needs preschool/childcare, we may have more of one age than the other.  As you can see from above, what time of year a child is born will determine when they go to Kindergarten, not what age they are at that moment.  We continue to operate as a multi age preschool/childcare no matter what ages we have.

*In Minnesota, any child that turns 5 before Sept 1st can enter Kindergarten.  Sometimes parents who have a child with a summer birthday (they turn 5 between June-August 31st), will wait until the following September to start Kindergarten.  We call groups of children that will be in the same grade as each other a class.