Location: 60 Woodfield Road – Basement Level of Duke of Connaught School
Website: http://www.applegrovecc.ca/progfamily.htm
Regular Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 9 am to 2 pm.
Age: 0-6 years
Applegrove is one of the closest drop ins to my house and one of my favourites. It’s generally Tuesday to Friday from 9:00am to 2:00pm.
The best parts of Applegrove are:
- Large gymnasium space. Push toys available with lots of room to use. You can even take them in the hall. There are some infant push toys you can ask for and for older kids there are ride-on toys.
- Sand table is so much fun and such great sensory play. Especially if the weather isn’t great and you can’t take them to the park. Sometimes they have water play too.
- Staff is really nice and really helpful.
- Lots of different areas to play including indoor slide, play kitchen, play house, play tool shed.
- Wood train set on a table is a good height for kids that are cruising around on furniture.
Circle Time
Most of the time it seems circle time is a bit too chaotic for the infants and toddlers. There are a lot of kids running around. Fortunately, it seems they have started to run a baby circle time on Tuesdays at 12:45. I think this is fantastic and I hope that this continues.
Some things to be aware of:
- You have to leave strollers out on lawn, I know some parents may have theft concerns. I’ve never had an issue though.
- It is a shoes on drop in which is may not be preferable if you baby is still crawling.
- I’ve noticed sometimes kids there aren’t the best supervised possible because of the large space. There are “be gentle” signs in the baby area but a few times I’ve seen older kids there unsupervised. In general the drop in seems to have more older kids.
