Sprouts Academy Preschool

Our son has been going to Sprouts since he was 2 years old. Now, he is almost 5 and ready to go to Kindergarten. We also started our 2 year old daughter there just recently. We have had a great experience at Sprouts. Our son has severe nut allergies and they are a nut free school. Kids are not allowed to bring in any snacks to share. In fact, they serve lunch and it is all organic and healthy meals. The teachers are extremely qualified with many pursuing masters degrees. They have tons of enrichment programs. And it is a totally green school! They learn about nature, recycling, and helping the environment every single day. The school also has its own garden where kids get to plant and grow fruits and vegetables. We have had a wonderful experience here!

Our daughter currently attends Sprouts Academy. We looked at five different preschools in the Wicker Park/​West Town area before choosing Sprouts. We could not be happier with the experience we are having.
Our daughter loves going to school!
The facility is safe, secure and clean. The teachers (Erin and Dayna) and staff are outstanding and really care about the children.
There are many opportunities for parents to participate in activities.
Our daughter talks about her music and yoga classes, her trips to the park, her field trips to the Urban Garden. She has new friends, her vocabulary tripled in less than a month, she started using the potty on her third day, and she enjoys healthy, organic vegetarian meals every day.
We highly recommend this school!

Our son attended school here for almost 3 years starting at 2 ½ years old. We started one month after the school opened and while there were some growing pains with the school, our overall experience was very positive. The main reason we liked the school was the caliber of the teachers and the student teacher ratio. We also really loved their extra Smithsonian enrichment programs. We are now in kindergarten and come back frequently to visit and say hello to his old teachers.

I and my wife are the parents of a 2.5 year old daughter who just began today! We researched many schools. I had visited this school in the past. This is a very well organized preschool, very pleasant to be in regarding the physical space, thoughtfulness is reflected in many ways through the school. The staff have been uniformly professional, intelligent and informative. While a bit clingy for the first five minutes, my daughter adopted to the class shortly thereafter even as I and my wife stayed in the classroom for 5 more minutes to watch. We stayed in the hallway talking to another parent we know whose child has been there for several months. She reported a few concerns but overall good satisfacion; I know she investigaged many schools prior to selecting Sprouts as she is very selective, with a Top 10 MBA, from a nationally renowned university. I have a Ph.D. from University of Chicago in Economics, running a successful nationwide consulting firm, so I am not exactly a guy off the street myself. As we chatted in the hallway, we peaked in during the next 20 minutes. At one point, my daughter saw me, smiled and continued her activities in the classroom. Clearly she felt safe and comfortable. I write all this in part because I saw a review of someone who claims to have visited a year ago and was dissatisfied with the experience. It seemed that the commentary was really off the wall, more like from an emotionally unbalanced blowhard than from someone who can see situations in a neutral objection manner. Maybe that author has a stake in the competition? In any event, every preschool has to meet the parents’ own sense of quality and satisfaction. Sprouts certainly has met ours.
Stan V. Smith, Ph.D.

Our son, who will turn three in a week) has been at Sprouts for almost a year, and if I could design a school from scratch this would be it. There are many, many great things about this school — from the physical space to the organic food — but ultimately it’s the teachers and the staff that make this place amazing. They all have (or are working on) masters’ degrees in early childhood ed but beyond their professional credentials they are nurturing, caring and fun. My son runs into school every day excited to see his teachers and friends. The kids do the coolest things, from tending a plot of land at a nearby urban garden to art classes with someone from the Smithsonian. I’m constantly amazed at the things he tells me that he learned at school, from showing me a yoga pose to telling me why it’s bad to pollute the river. We live in the neighborhood and when we walk by he proudly says, «That’s MY school!»
Not once in the past year have I walked into Sprouts and seen chaos as Scott Y. described, and due to my varying work schedule I am there at different times throughout the week. Much more important is the feedback from parents who actually have their kids there.
Thanks, Sprouts, for creating such a wonderful learning environment for my son!

I checked out no less than 10 day cares in downtown, South Loop, Lincoln Park, Lake View… before we settled down with Sprouts Academy, which easily stood out. My daughter used to go to a Chinese day care before we moved to Chicago, and she didn’t understand a single English word. Naturally she had a hard time at the beginning. However the teachers were all very nice and they tried really hard to communicate with her — they even created a cheat sheet of daily Chinese vocabulary! After two weeks my daughter started to like the place.