Expressive Beginnings Child Care is a new division of Heritage Christian Services, an agency that serves more than 1,500 children and adults with developmental disabilities throughout the Rochester and Buffalo areas.
For more than 27 years, Heritage Christian has offered high quality, compassionate care. Child care is a natural outgrowth of its mission and ministry of service.
EBCC is not a child care center specifically for children with developmental disabilities but it accommodates as many special needs families as possible and is backed by the expertise and knowledge of Heritage Christian Services and its staff of 15 clinicians next door at the Pieters Family Life Center. The Life Center is a family health and wellness facility that has been nationally recognized for its inclusive programming. It excels in bringing together people of all abilities in a natural environment, really offering families of all backgrounds the chance to form meaningful friendships.
To provide a living and working environment that reflects the love of Christ in action; support and respect for each individual’s gifts, strengths and needs; opportunity to mature, learn and grow; a life of dignity, worth and expression to which all are entitled as God’s created children. This is their rightful HERITAGE.
At Expressive Beginnings we believe that families are the first and most important teachers of their children. It is only through family involvement that children can develop secure attachments. Family is crucial to the success of our program. Our center is designed around the family with our unique family rooms and continuity of care, not just for individual children, but for the whole family.
Our focus is to help the children develop cognitive, social emotional, physical, creative, and language skills through the basis of secure attachments. It is our responsibility, as child care providers, to nurture a child’s self image and their perception of the world as they know it. We do this through a child centered environment that encourages a child’s unique creative expression.
The curriculum will be designed around the children’s interests so that their learning is authentic and self-motivated. Our philosophy and understanding of children is that they learn through play. The children will be encouraged to express themselves through the multiple intelligences; interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, special, linguistic, logical/mathematical, naturalistic, and existential.
At both Expressive Beginnings and Heritage Christian Services, we ask each staff member to daily exemplify the Heritage Christian Difference through actions and words. In our workplace, we value: