Time to Grow – Tiny Lab Turns 5!
Updated: Aug 20, 2021
It’s hard to believe, but today we celebrate our 5 year anniversary! On June 26, 2014 we welcomed in our first group of children and their families to our little child care centre. At the time we only had our Toddler Room open. We grew quickly and opened our second classroom, our Preschool Room, a few short months later. We’ve been full ever since! To all of our families and staff past and present, we want to say THANK YOU! Thank you for trusting us, believing in us, supporting us, and helping to make Tiny Lab a community in itself. A Tiny Lab has changed so much over the past 5 years, but remains rooted in our objective to offer the highest quality early learning program for children within a welcoming, accepting, inclusive and natural space. Ahh, space, if only we had a bit more of it!… But before we get to that, a minute to reflect on our journey so far …
Building it
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Life Inside
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Life Outside
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Food
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Community
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A Time and a Place to Grow
Demand for space at A Tiny Lab has far exceeded any expectation we ever had. For the last 4 years we have not been able to keep up with the requests from the many families wanting to join us. We are a small, family-run child care centre with a small teaching staff. We’ve been thinking about a modest expansion for quite some time but it hasn’t been an easy process. The difficulties around finding suitable space and the many unknowns due to the launching of the pre-primary program across the Province has impacted us and other centres greatly. We are happy to say though, that after a long process working with our Department, we are ready to move forward and will be expanding A Tiny Lab in the very near future!
As many of you know, the building adjacent to us is currently under-construction. We will be taking the ground floor of the building (Maitland Street) to join it to our existing centre with a common lobby. This will allow us to open up two new, fully accessible classrooms and additional flex space for both the children and our teachers. Jillian may even be able to get an office with a door!
This makes so much sense for us. A Tiny Lab is a barely break-even operation. Our goal is a neighbourhood centre that is sustainable in the long term. These extra spaces will allow us to operate a more efficient kitchen, to cover the cost of much needed flex space, staff space, and additional support for our hard working and phenomenal staff.
There is still lots to do and we ask for your patience over the coming months. We intend to keep our daily operations as consistent as possible. There will be a period when our kitchen is under construction which will impact our menu temporarily. We will have to use our rear entrance while the new lobby is being constructed. There will likely be small headaches and unexpected surprises .…. We intend to take it all in stride, and with a smile!
For those on our waitlist, we currently have 300 families either looking for, or hoping for child care in the future. We have your info and we receive your emails. We do our best to respond, however, our daily operations take up the majority of our focus. We will be consulting our waitlist to fill these two new classrooms. We will have space for 18 Toddlers and 24 Preschoolers. Our timeline is somewhat uncertain at this time – you will likely be hearing from us in late 2019/early 2020. We are anticipating that our waitlist will remain closed for the next 6 months to a year as we try to accommodate as many families as we can with this expansion.
Thank you again to everyone that has, and continues to, support us in the work that we do. We love our centre, our kids, our families, our staff, our neighbourhood.
For today – we celebrate. We eat the cake, reflect on how far we’ve come and look forward to the future.