Cherry Blossom Learning Center

I sent my daughter to Cherry Blossom from the time she was about seven months until she was 16 months. It came highly recommended from a friend of a friend whose daughter was enrolled there. I moved her after my husband and I no longer lived or worked in Downtown Miami or Brickell and couldn’t justify driving all that way just to turn around and head to work by home. To this day, we are so sad that she had to move.
The classes are split up by year and children are permitted to go into the next class as soon as they hit the next year, as long as there is space. Each room has video cameras and the school provides log in information for parents to see their children. They also have finger reading machine so that not just anyone can get into the school.
We thought the nursery for children under one year old was great — they were very loving and took good care of the children. It was a small ratio which I can’t recall exactly but it was either one to three or one to four. To get to the nursery parents needed to walk through the one year old class room so we were able to see what the kids in that room were doing too. The women in the nursery were willing to feed our daughter breast milk that I pumped at work each day. As our daughter started to get closer to one year we found that she would be moved occasionally into the one year old classroom to have breakfast or play at the end of the day. We saw that as a huge benefit because we thought she could only learn from kids older than her. The monthly cost for the nursery was $ 850.
When our daughter moved into the one year old class it was a seamless transition because she already knew the teachers. She absolutely loved them and would happily jump into their arms when she got to school. We felt like her teachers loved and cared for her as we would during the day, which made it easier to leave her each day. Since we later moved her to a different nursery we are well aware that is not always the case. Cherry Blossom does not keep televisions in the rooms, which is a good thing and not always the case in every preschool. They take the time to pay attention to the children and teach them even when school is over and they basically are in aftercare. Plus, the children get the benefit of hearing Spanish and English on a daily basis, so that they can become multilingual. While our daughter was there, The monthly cost for one year olds was $ 800, which included meals and snacks brought in from a food service company.
When she moved to the one year old class the school provided a menu of items the children would be given each day (included in the tuition) so that we could decide if we preferred that she eat something else. We would have preferred an organic option but decided that she was getting that at home to counteract what she was eating at home and it would be too difficult to have her eating something different than the other kids.
In the summertime, the kids in one year old and higher classes get to have «swim» days in a very small above ground pool they bring in to the play area. The teachers gave us photos of the swim experiences as well as other days at the school, which we really appreciated.
The only negative thing we would say is that we were not happy with the three-​hour naps for one year olds. That was just too long for our daughter, who would refuse to go to sleep until really late. We found a significant difference when she changed to a nursery with much shorter naps.
We were really sad to move our daughter and continue to talk about how wonderful Cherry Blossom was. We are still on a quest for a school as nurturing as Cherry Blossom in our local area.

We’ve been sending our little one there since he was 1 year old, it’s 3.5 years later and we couldn’t be happier. It feels like a little family there and he has really become like family with the other kids. The teachers especially in the baby & 1 year old section as well as VPK really care about the kids. The administrators and owners really work with the parents if any issues arise, and they have a camera system so that you can watch you kid anytime online. They have one or two girls who clean and disinfect all day so it’s very reassuring to know that they do their best to keep the kids from making each other sick. We looked at Montessori and a few others but they were much more expensive and/​or they had shorter hours or didn’t provide food which means more work for us. I’m so happy we found Cherry Blossom and so are the other parents we’ve referred to the school. It’s a very loving and positive environment, and Iove that the first few «grades» are bilingual. It might not be the fanciest or most stuck up preschool but the family and loving learning atmosphere trump the other pre-​schools in the area. Thanks Cherry Blossom!!!