HFCDC’s goal is to provide high quality care and education where each child’s holistic development is the focus. We focus on nurturing and growing each child’s physical, social, and cognitive skills in developmentally appropriate ways because each child develops at their own rate. Since we focus on children as individuals, we keep a low teacher-to-child ratio of 1-to-5 in order to successfully meet each child’s individual needs. We enroll children from 6 weeks to kindergarten. We are a multi-age program that is play based with a balance of structured and free choice play. We choose to be a multi-age program because there are numerous benefits and advantages. These benefits are not only ones that we see in our center, but are benefits that have been recognized through research worldwide. The first and most noticeable advantage is the rate at which children acquire social and language skills. When children of different ages are placed in the same setting, the setting becomes a unique language rich environment full of various stages of development that has great potential to build each child’s language and social skills. Another key benefit of the multi-age program is that children interact and naturally assume empathizing and nurturing roles toward each other. A multi-age program also benefits siblings. When siblings are placed in a new environment together, it reduces fear and separation anxiety. An additional advantage of this type of program is that there are a limited number of transitions during their years of attendance.