Best Preschool ever!!! We were lucky to be a part of it. My daughter says she met the best teachers there ❤.

This preschool has exceeded my expectations. My daughter is prepared for kindergarten socially, intellectually, and emotionally because of the time the teachers have spent planning, collaborating, and working with each child. Some of the ways this is accomplished are: -The teachers do a wonderful job following the students’ internets. -The kids learn through play. -Each child is taken seriously and given the space they need to develop compassion for themselves and others. I could go on and on about how wonderful this school and community are!

We love this school! Theres something really special about Families Together. Its teachers and administrators are so caring. We love the play-based learning, gentle nurturing, and focus on community and equity. We know our future Kindergarten will be leaving FTCNS a better, more-well-rounded, and thoughtful little person.

I cannot say enough about how much our family loves FTCNS.  Even with additional challenges, my daughter has flourished in her sense of independence, curiosity and social importance. Each child in the FTCNS classroom is taken seriously and treated with genuine respect and compassion. No topic or inquiry is shied away from, while all emotions are given a level of importance. The teachers are incredibly attentive to student interest and allow children the space they need to learn and interact with each other through play. Lastly, the collaborative nature of this school lends to an authentic sense of community - you know the students, you know the parents, you know the teachers, and EVERYONE helps to keep the community healthy (in all ways). It truly is a beautiful place to watch children grow and develop.

Families Together was a lovely experience for us. We didn’t start our kid in preschool until she was four, and as a newly staying-at-home mom, I wasn’t even sure she even needed preschool. We wanted a play-based, child-led experience that would encourage her growth without having academic pressure, and that’s what we found. Our kid thrived there.The teachers are kind, loving people, which of course is what everyone wants for their children. But more than that, they are all experienced and fully versed (and continually get more training and education) in current pedagogical approaches that nurture children’s growth and allow for natural progression.We loved this school so much — and were so ambivalent about mainstream kindergarten and its academic pressure — that we stayed at Families Together where our kid enjoyed another year of part-time school for kindergarten. This was the right choice! Our kid felt no pressure to read, but was exposed to books and reading and writing all the time. Same for math, science, social studies... in this stellar environment, our kid’s emerging creativity, curiosity, engineering mind, and empathy grew enormously. And our ties to the school community made our recent move back to Chicago so much better.Our kid could still not read when she entered first grade, and we were fine with her learning it when she was ready. Within a month after starting first grade, she was reading (we chose an elementary school that allowed for individual progress instead of a “one milestone timeline fits all“ approach). By the middle of the school year, she was reading at second-grade level. I’m certain her progress was a direct result of the learning environment at Families Together.Families Together fostered our kid’s independent learning path, her confidence, and her love of learning. With their guidance we now have an engaged student who expects school to be a wonderful place where she will learn things every day, and where she will be expected to be part of a growth-oriented classroom community as it experiences challenges and learns how to work cooperatively. And that is the perfect description of the Families Together environment.I wish it were more diverse in staff and students, and am glad they have that in their goals and planning. They are doing a good job so far in creating a diverse experience for the kids.

Families Together is a warm, engaging, safe, fun, educational, enriching preschool with loving, creative, insightful teachers. The cooperative component makes it so that you learn more about your child and their friends, more about child development from the teachers, and you create strong bonds with the teachers, parents, and other kids. We would go back there in a heartbeat!

All the teachers and staff at this school are wonderful. You truly feel like youre part of a cooperative community. My son LOVES LOVES LOVES his school.

We love FTCNS so much. The teachers, the admin, the parent community: this school was an amazing experience for all of us and proved to be an excellent foundation for our daughters (now ages 8 and 10) as they transitioned to CPS. I cant recommend FTCNS enough.

FTCNS has been amazing for our daughters. Their play-based system is one that works wonders and is in our view essential for pre-schoolers. I cant recommend FTCNS enough! Weve been sending both of our children for several years in a row and they have loved every minute.

We love FTCNS so much! The staff and teachers are second-to-none and we love the co-op model. The pedagogy is a perfect and extremely hard-to-find merger of Dewey + Reggio, which means play-based learning rooted in emergent curriculum (i.e. child-led) and natural world / whole community experiences. We feel so lucky to have found Families Together -- we love it so much that even though weve moved out of the neighborhood, we will be commuting from the northwest burbs for our sons last year. #playmatters

My daughter loves this school