Our enriched afternoon program complements the goals of our morning program by providing a variety of co-curricular activities for the children to enjoy. These activities are directly linked to your child’s learning in the Montessori classroom, and allow all of those skills that have been previously introduced in isolation to be implemented and practiced in an authentic and social setting. It is in these afternoon activities that the children learn to pace themselves according to a group rhythm.
Our afternoon program offers a wide and alternating variety of activities that will allow your child to explore new skills and find new passions. The array of activities – offered by specialists both visiting and in-house – focuses on the development of the whole child, with a focus on igniting a sense of balance, perspective, wonder, discovery and imagination.
Click below to discover just some of the learning experiences your child will engage in.
Discovery
Problem-solving activities that enrich the mind.
Budding Architects
In this class, our budding architects have the opportunity to design, plan and create structures and buildings, houses and cities. With topics that include construction vehicles, famous landmarks and tools, the children and their classmates create original innovations using a variety of building materials on hand. In this collaborative process, they exercise spatial awareness and spatial reasoning, and experiment with their understanding of measurement and geometry.
Tinker Lab
Sparking moments of wonder and discovery, tinker play revolves around figuring out how things work, how to put things together, and how to take things apart. The Tinker Lab is the perfect setting for playful exploration, inviting curious young minds to experiment with new tools and new materials, and to consider using specific items in a variety of different ways. This example of “maker education” is closely associated with STEM project-based learning which relies on hands-on, collaborative learning experiences as a method for solving authentic problems.
Kinder Coding
Growing up in a digital world, coding has become an important skill to learn. Our kinder-coders begin with special board games to learn coding fundamentals, computational thinking and problem solving, before moving on to Osmo’s Awbie. Through the process, our aspiring coders strengthen their number sense, exercise their understanding of directionality, learn to follow multi-step directions and explore the inter-dependent concepts of movement and location
Little Builders, Big Blocks
The Imagination Playground’s Big Blue Blocks housed in our Orchard House Gym include a wide variety of loose parts, including cubes, bricks, curves, and cylinders. They have holes and shapes that fit together in ways that allow for building, stacking, channeling, and connecting. Through teacher-guided activities and challenges, our Little Builders plan, collaborate and problem-solve together. True to their name, these Big Blocks combine all the benefits of block play on a larger-than-life-size scale.
Kitchen Chemistry
What do you get when you merge Orchard House’s Petits Chefs Kitchen with our STEM Lab? Kitchen chemistry! Here, our aprons become our lab coats as we experiment with everyday kitchen ingredients to learn simple chemical concepts, and we study the basic science behind kitchen activities such as heating, boiling, freezing and mixing.
Lego Club
Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and motor development are just a few areas that children benefit from when joining the Lego Club. Since its creation in 1940, Lego has become one of the most popular educational construction toys to this day. In each class, children embark on a new challenge, from creating skyscrapers to building their very own working cranes.
