WonderKids Celebrates 30 Years of ‘Home-Like Environment’ Child Care

WARWICK, RI — Thirty years ago, Mary Lou Reynolds left a career in finance to provide quality child care to Warwick parents, and commissioned the Wonderkids Early Learning Center building on Alhambra Road to house her new venture, a shift she’s perpetually thrilled about.

“It just keeps getting, actually, better and better every year,” Reynolds said Monday as she and the teachers at her center, built for the day care of children six weeks to five-years-old, prepared for a ribbon cutting with Mayor Scott Avedisian and Sen. Michael J. McCaffrey (D-Dist. 29, Warwick) celebrating the center’s third decade of service to the city.

“She started babysitting, babysitting me,” McCaffrey said before he and Avedisian each got a tour of the building, which features two infant rooms, two pre-school rooms and two toddler rooms, the children in question taking an afternoon nap to the soothing sounds of recorded ocean waves and soft lullabies.

The facility’s classrooms feature unique and individual characteristics for each of their day programs.

Every classroom is equipped with the age-appropriate elements necessary to successfully reinforce teachers’ skills. They provide a consistent environment so every child can enjoy his/her own individual program without any interference from other classrooms, and ensure each specific program’s goals and objectives are met.

The philosophy provides faculty and staff the ability to monitor each individual child’s development, and creates the accountability necessary to inform and discuss each child’s goals and objectives with their families, and ensure that any changes and/or adjustments for each individual child are met.

“Our goal has always been to give parents comfort in knowing that they have chosen the best possible home-like environment for their child to learn, grow and develop with great success both academically and socially,” Reynolds wrote on the center’s introduction on their website.

Joe said he helped build the facility with their father, Bud, with the family’s construction company, Pariseault Builders, in Wawrick. Their father has since passed on, Joe said, but the company continues the tradition Bud founded in 1946.

WonderKids is open Monday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Free tours are available by calling 401-714-4945.