When we were considering Lesley Ellis for preschool, we asked around on the playground, and just…read moreabout every parent we talked to told us, "It's excellent! The only negative is the cost." That matched our experience perfectly. The tuition is steep - though financial aid is available! - but everything else was fantastic, and we were consistently impressed with the teachers, curriculum, field trips, awareness of kids as individuals, interaction with administration, and more. My mom worked for decades in early childhood education, and (as an interested and involved grandparent) was also very impressed. They welcomed/encouraged heavy parent involvement, from "come into the classroom to talk about something you're knowledgeable/passionate about" to occasional parent-meetups-over-coffee in the morning and more. But I was never, ever made to feel guilty about not being able to participate heavily, which was the norm once we had our second kid. (Who also went to LES for preschool, once old enough.) We can't speak to their K-8 experience, but for preschool/pre-K/TK they were fantastic.

Lesley Ellis is an independent school from pre-school to grade 6, but expanding soon to 8th. Our…read moredaughter is in her third year there and we have been delighted with the program. The teachers are an outstanding group and attuned to the needs of each individual student. The administration is truly exceptional as they create an environment where parents, children and the school come together to form a nurturing and vibrant community.

Cambridge Montessori School embraced both of my children and placed them at the center of the…read morelearning experience. They love going to this school and their CMS experience has taught them to love learning. My second grader interacts with adults gracefully and articulately because of the skills and confidence this schooling experience has given her. CMS has an excellent arts, music, and drama offering and the teachers encourage academic excellence. I would recommend CMS to any parent looking for a school that supports a curriculum that encourages independence and confidence in addition to accelerated learning.

The school culture is rigid and judgmental, with a culture of pathologizing normal toddler…read morebehavior. Some of the things that made us withdraw our 3yo mid-year: Despite a stated open-door policy, parents were actively discouraged from involvement in or visiting the classroom. In March, a formal school memo forbade parents from speaking to each other at drop-off/pickup, asked parents to drop their children off at the front door instead of at the classroom door, and instructed parents not to carry their children or their children's belongings. The memo specifically suggested that any discipline problems at home were caused by not following the same rigid "expectations" as the school. When our son was afraid to use the toilet at school, the teacher forced him to sit on the toilet for 45 min while he cried in frustration. He was criticized for not doing work exactly the way the teachers wanted (e.g. sorting puzzle in the "right" order). In a parent conference, we were told our son was "too literal" because asked where rain came from, he said "From the sky," not "From clouds." He was already reading and adding at 3, but we were told this, along with his shyness, were signs of a possible psychological problem. We were bullied to take him for autism screening, even after a specialist and our pediatrician said he was likely fine. Administration, up to the head of school, either ignored problems or blamed us. When we sent a formal letter detailing our complaints, the school offered us a partial tuition refund if we signed a nondisparagement agreement. We refused. We've since learned other families had similar experiences. If you click on Yelp's "non-recommended reviews"--which are weeded out by algorithm--you'll see that other families have made similar complaints.

Children have been going to Casa Esme for 2 years. Couldn't be happier.read more

My infant child briefly attended this daycare in the Spring of 2008 until the EEC shut her down for…read moreseveral days for keeping many many children in excess of their license. The EEC was alerted to a potential problem by a neighbor who found a child under 2 wandering outside Esme's house. It was later learned, from the EEC, that Esme had an unlicensed room on the second floor of her home where infants were being held during the day. The parents never saw this room as it was not part of the daycare portion of the home. I thought my child was being kept with the rest of the children but he was held in a room I had never even been in--and that the licensor hadn't been in either since it was never disclosed as part of the daycare. The EEC briefly shut her down until she came back into compliance with her license. I believe at the time she was licensed to keep ten children at a time, with only a small number of those being infants. The EEC ultimately allowed her to reopen when she proved compliance but our family never returned. If there had been a fire in the home, infants could have died because they were on an unlicensed floor of the home with not enough providers to carry them to safety if something had happened. This was a traumatic realization for our family. I thought I had checked references properly-consulting the Arlington Parents List and calling many parent references. We learned, subsequently, from the EEC to ALWAYS phone the licensing agent in your town to find out what violations have been brought against a daycare provider. That said, the EEC I believe will only tell you violations from the past five years. I hope parents will read this comment. I would never in a million years trust my child or yours w/ Esme. I was horrified that she would put the lives of babies at risk for her own financial gain. At the time, our family was horrified that she blamed families in need of infant care on her decision to operate outside the bounds of her license. Please phone the EEC if you are considering this provider and find out if other violations have been brought against her. If you call the main office, you can ask to speak to the licensing agent in Arlington. And please consider other providers. I know how tough it is to find full time childcare but sometimes if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

When looking for a school for our children six years ago, we found Kingsley Montessori and were…read morevery impressed by the staff and the educational program. We decided to our have our children attend the school and are very happy that we did. By utilizing the Montessori method in the younger classes and weaving it in to the older classrooms (which go through 6th grade), Kingsley offers a creative, fun, and effective way of learning. Not only are our children achieving academic success, but they both also love going into the classroom each day. As a family, we adore the caring and thoughtful staff and the overall school community. Highly recommend.

Kingsley has been the best learning experience for my child. In his first year of attendance, I saw…read morea marked change in my son's curiosity, adaptability, resilience, and thoughtfulness. His teachers care not only about his educational growth, but are invested in his personal growth-- taking time to learn about his interests and passions and finding ways to bring these (and the passions of all his classmates!) into the classroom. We can't wait to send our daughter to the school next year and watch her thrive, too.

Our son has been attending LKA for preschool since 2023. He absolutely loves going to school and…read morelearning, engaging, interacting with his sensei and school friends. Reiko Sensei does a phenomenal job in really getting to know each child and takes a keen interest in their development and growth which is evident during our regular parent teacher conferences. LKA dedicates a tremendous amount of energy and thought into their curricula and incorporates various cultures and languages in their regular teaching. They have music and art class and have various events throughout the school year. Each sensei is welcoming, loving, gentle, and understanding. We get daily photos and videos and daily updates w their activities and curricula and it's one of the highlights of my day! Our son's social skills and speech improved tremendously after joining LKA and he enjoys his school days so much that he recently asked to extend his days until 5:30pm! His younger sister will also be joining the LKA family in a couple of months and his soon to be born baby sister will follow in their footsteps. From the moment I do school drop off, I know that my child will be cared for and loved and that is priceless. I cannot say enough good things about Reiko Sensei, all of the senseis, and LKA and I highly recommend LKA !

Our family loves LKA! Our older daughter has been there for three years and we did not have any…read moredoubts about enrolling our younger daughter after she was born. The director is knowledgeable, accessible, and creative. You can tell she really loves the kids. We like that it's a small center (one preschool room, one toddler room, one infant room) and that they incorporate Japanese exposure as well as lots of crafts, music, dance, yoga, and plenty of free play and outdoor time. I love seeing my daughters' faces light up when they find their favorite teachers in the morning. I'm so grateful we have LKA in our lives!

We joined Wild Rose, a Wildflower offspring, at the early stage and grew together over the years…read more WR started with 9 kids and now has over 40, with about half in primary and the rest in elementary. The teachers are kind and experienced, helping kids learn more about social values instead of test taking. Kids are given autonomy and expected to contribute to the school system by shopping for food, cooking, cleaning up the classroom, setting up projects, etc. We experienced some growing pains but overall was well worth it. Parents are expected to be involved but this has been reduced to about once a month instead of per week. The low teacher to kid ratio ensures more attention and opportunity to aid the kids in their weaker areas. The school is looking to grow into middle school (grade 5+) and is actively looking for children aged 9-11 for the next academic year. It is well worth taking a tour to see if it is the right fit for your family!

My 5yo son attends Wild Rose. The things that I think make it special are:…read more - it's deliberately a small, one-classroom, shopfront school. So it's a very close-knit group and the teachers have a lot of autonomy and passion for making the best school they can. - it's true to the Montessori tradition without falling into dogma -- observation and experimentation are important elements. The school cooperates with researchers at the MIT Media Lab that are studying new methods and materials. - it's a mixed-age classroom. This creates so many wonderful opportunities for younger children to learn from older children and for older children to practice being leaders and teachers.

My son attended EFB in the 2021 school year. He had previously attended a French-language…read morepreschool in Lexington, but that school closed as a consequence of the pandemic. After a year of no school, my wife and I enrolled him at EFB, in the hope we could pick up where we had left off. Biggest mistake of my life - and one which had real consequences for my son. As far as I ever learned, his teacher, whom I had met previously when she worked with animals at Massachusetts Veterinary Referral Hospital in Woburn, had had no prior experience working with children. Her primary job qualification appeared to be that she was a native French speaker. She was extremely ill-equipped to work with young children, never mind a child such as my son who had been out of school for a year and who had spent that year largely secluded with his parents. And she was not alone: while there were a handful of people at the school who took their responsibilities seriously (I shall always be indebted in particular to Isabelle Ward), too many were unwilling, or unable, to respond to the singular demands of either that particular moment in history - the reopening of the world following a pandemic - or of their students. I was astounded, for example, during a video orientation with the school counselor prior to the start of the school year, that no thought had been given to how this rentrée, after the entire world had been closed for more than a year, was going to be different from any other. No thought was given to how to accommodate students whose whole worlds had been turned upside down when they were still learning to walk, and who were now trying to get their sea legs on a ship - the world! - still in the process of righting itself. When my son started to shut down in this environment of sheer thoughtlessness, he was treated as a problem, with little or no attempt to understand where he was coming from, or what the school should undertake to try to help him (again, there were one or two exceptions, including Isabelle Ward, whom I once again acknowledge and thank). At one point, his teacher noted, in a conference with my wife and me, that my son said he hated school, something that she seemed to think made him some kind of school shooter in the bud. Any time a "teacher" makes such a suggestion about a 4 (!) year old who weighed all of 40 lbs soaking wet, it says something about her and the school she represents, and nothing at all about the kid. To be fair: no one had any experience navigating a rentrée like 2021. Instead of recognizing this massively obvious fact, however, EFB just wanted to go on as if nothing had happened. I understand this desire; I even succumbed to it myself when I enrolled my son at EFB, as if it could be an adequate substitute for the school where he had thrived prior to the pandemic and which no longer existed. Succumbing to this desire, however, had real consequences for my son - consequences for which I hold myself responsible first of all, but also EFB, for its unwillingness or inability to adapt in the least way when those consequences began to emerge. My wife and I pulled my son out of EFB when we realized how harmful it was for him. But the months he spent there left scars that will last a lifetime. I have waited 5 years to write this review, and do so now only because my son disclosed last night, for the first time, how harshly he was once disparaged at EFB for taking an empty toilet paper roll out of the bathroom. Suddenly, I understood something that had happened at EFB and had hitherto been a mystery: my son, who has been toilet trained since the age of 2, suddenly stopped using the bathroom at EFB, to the point of repeatedly peeing his pants at school, at the end of the day when he could no longer hold it in anymore. I had never understood why - until he recounted this story. I can't think of a more damning anecdote about this school.

We've been at EFGB in Cambridge with our two children since September 2017. It's been a wonderful…read moreexperience. All the teachers are native French speaking and the children are completely immersed in French. They spend their days drawing, playing, singing, reading, and everything you would expect in a high quality preschool. The teachers are warm and engaged. There's a playground attached to the school and they go out every day, even in bad weather. It's been great to get involved with a Francophone community. The schedule is less convenient than a typical daycare for working parents (more like a school schedule, no food provided) but for us, the loss of convenience is more than made up for by the quality of the school and unique ability to have our children's early years be completely bilingual.

I posted this on the original EFGB review page; it applies to EFGB Cambridge, since that's where…read morewe've been sending our children. We've been at EFGB in Cambridge with our two children since September 2017. It's been a wonderful experience. All the teachers are native French speaking and the children are completely immersed in French. They spend their days drawing, playing, singing, reading, and everything you would expect in a high quality preschool. There's even a weekly yoga session! The teachers are warm and engaged. The class sizes are small and the teachers know all of their charges very well. There's a playground attached to the school and they go out every day, even in bad weather. It's been great to get involved with a Francophone community. The parents are engaged and we see each other for holiday parties, birthdays, and playdates; we hope to still be in touch with French friends even as the children grow older and graduate to public schools. The schedule is a little less convenient than a typical daycare for working parents (more like a school schedule, no food provided though that may change soon) but for us, the loss of convenience is more than made up for by the quality of the school and unique ability to have our children's early years be completely bilingual.

The Ecole Francaise of Greater Boston (EFGB) opened its doors in Cambridge in the fall of 2017 and…read moremy daughter was lucky enough to be in its first promotion. The school outperformed my highest expectations. The teachers are top-notch, and they bring students the best of American and French educational systems -- with an emphasis on creativity matched by structured activities and clear rules. The students in our year came from a mix of cross-cultural families, representing 14 countries. The Cambridge campus, which is on the ground floor of a luminous building with warm, bright colors, welcomes kids aged two through six, while the Watertown branch of the school is open to older children. The school's location in North Cambridge was convenient to us, as we work at Harvard and MIT. They also have built in pre-school and after-school care to allow flexibility for working parents, like us. I envied my daughter's activities, which ranged from yoga, expressive dance, singing, painting, reading and numeracy to scrambling in the school's playground with a mix of kids of all ages. The crafts she brought home -- pictures of baobabs, an ant made of an egg carton, an aquarium in a shoe box -- are unique pieces that I treasure. Furthermore, the teachers created a lively Facebook page so we could stay engaged with our child's activities, for example, watching a caterpiller grow and hatch, or witnessing the joys of a group of toddlers getting their first taste of honeycomb. Whether your family are native French speakers or not, you would not regret sending your child to the EFGB. I can't imagine a better school.