Kelsey Irelan, new to Arizona, was looking for a job for herself and a child care center for her 1-year-old daughter, Amaya. She found Beautiful Oasis Child Care Center in Mesa, which is enrolled in the Quality First program.
The First Things First Southeast Maricopa Regional Partnership Council funds Quality First, which partners with child care and preschool providers to improve the quality of early learning development across Arizona. The regional council also funds Quality First scholarships for eligible families, which Irelan qualified for.
Before moving to Gilbert, Amaya spent her first year of life napping in a car seat while Irelan worked as a contractor for a food delivery service.
“When you have a child that’s with you all the time, you are kind of stuck,” Irelan said. “I would take her with me to knock on people’s doors and drop things off.”
These days, instead of waiting in her car seat, Amaya spends her days playing with other children and learning through the activities her teachers lead, while her mother provides customer service from the office of a local HVAC business.
Since she started at Beautiful Oasis, Irelan has especially seen growth in her daughter’s abilities to express herself and Amaya’s vocabulary skills have blossomed.
“She talks so much,” Irelan said. She comes home and she knows things I haven’t taught her. I’ve seen her grow tremendously,” Irelan said. “This year, they made these little art projects with bats on them. I remember her bringing it home and saying, ‘Mom, look! A bat! A bat!’ Of course, that wasn’t something I was teaching her.”
Amaya’s teachers agree.
“When she first started, (Amaya) was a very shy and meek child, standing off to the side,” Beautiful Oasis CEO Toshina Thames said. “Now she has flourished and has such personality. She is learning and is helping other children.”
Helping young children with these types of executive function skills is key for getting a child ready for kindergarten. And being able to communicate effectively goes a long way toward positive socialization.
Teaching children to use their words to communicate emotions is important, Thames said. When someone takes a toy, for example, they often don’t know how to express their feelings.
“They might cry or try to take it back. Or, if someone hits them, they might hit back,” she said. “We walk them through how to identify how they are feeling, how to share that information with others in productive ways. We also teach them how to be mindful of the feelings of others.”
In Amaya’s case, this translated into learning to be helpful while building a sense of empathy for her peers.
Irelan can confirm.
“She (Amaya) is so involved with helping Miss Susan and the other kids, it’s almost as if she totally forgets her shyness,” the 29-year-old single mother of one said. “There was one time, specifically, when there was a little boy who was crying and the teacher said, ‘Amaya, can you please help me with this baby?’ And Amaya just snapped out of it and went into ‘mommy mode’ to help.”
In addition, Amaya’s mother said her child is learning everything—from social skills such as how to identify and communicate what she’s feeling, to using words to solve problems, to learning about animals and workplace tools Amaya would otherwise not have encountered such as bats and hand-held two-way radios.
“One major thing for me was that she wasn’t a good eater,” Irelan said of her daughter when they first enrolled in late 2023. “She only wanted me to feed her, and I was having a lot of trouble with that when I put her into that school. They did so amazing with getting her just to be on a schedule and be comfortable eating with them.”
Thames said Amaya’s experience is an example of the natural progression among children in her centers’ care.
“Children need structure,” Thames said. “We give them that at Beautiful Oasis. We have set times for snacks, lunch, naps, playtime and learning time. It’s the daily routine and repetition that teach kids to eat on schedule. They don’t know what time it is by the clock, but they know that you eat before you go to sleep. If you try to tell a 2-year-old to do something out of order, they will push back. They learn the routine quickly.”
Having Amaya in a classroom with children her age, with activities designed for her stage of development, is reassuring for Irelan. It’s a good mix of playtime—which is important to learning—and guided learning to prepare Amaya for kindergarten, she said.
“It’s really exciting to know that they are doing all those things for her and really helping her along her path,” Ireland said. “I’ve just seen her grow tremendously since she’s been in that school.”
