Pooja Dugar

Pooja Dugar is an ‘Early Learning Expert’ and the Founder and Principal of Leap Years Preschool. She is a trained designer from the National Institute of Fashion Technology and left a very successful career to nurture little minds. After the birth of her child, Pooja found her true calling to shape and nurture little minds and completed her Montessori teacher’s training. While teaching children, she understood that every child is unique with different developmental milestones.

“When I decided I wanted to be a Teacher, it was to help others find their passion in life. Through Leap Years, I want to ensure that children have an incredible opportunity, not only to explore and learn, but to discover who they are and how they can contribute to the world.” - Pooja Dugar

About Leap Years Preschool

Leap Years Preschool is Kolkata’s first of its kind preschool. Children here are taught using learning centres instead of traditional classroom way. We deliver a curriculum that follows The Maria Montessori Method clubbed with the Theory of Multiple Intelligence by Howard Gardner. The curriculum has been designed with the knowledge that “each child is unique”. The enriched curriculum features a unique partnership of core subjects, such as reading and maths, fine arts including yoga and music, to provide the child with the freedom to learn and grow through play. It’s an open learning source to which leading educators continuously contribute to, parents are encouraged to give feedback allowing the most creative, up-to- date and advanced philosophies to be incorporated. “Leap Years’ Teachers are great thinkers,” explains Pooja. “They’re trained to question ‘what and why’ and that is what they teach their students. They are empowered to adapt the curriculum to meet the unique needs of each student.”

My views on Early Childhood Development

Every child is unique and should be nurtured with love. Between 0 to 5 the human brain undergoes rapid development; it’s a period when a child builds cognitive skills — the foundation for reading, math, science and academics — as well as character skills, social-emotional growth, gross-motor skills and executive functioning, which includes everything from impulse control to problem solving. In the first five years of the child there is an explosion of activity, more profound than any future years. I believe that research into early childhood education and experience-based brain development will set a course for future learning, health and behaviour.