Enrichment Activities
Trevose Day School educators feel responsible in developing children holistically. The school’s academic curriculum is supplemented with a number of special programs aimed at nurturing well-rounded students utilizing their utmost intellectual, social, emotional and physical attributes.
Foreign Language
French is introduced during the First Program level, providing cultural engagement skills within an increasingly globalized world and an educational “passport” to foreign culture. In addition to technical language skills acquired in bilingualism, students learn about diverse societies French-speaking countries – from Algeria and Morocco to Belgium and France to Haiti, and as East as Vietnam. These programs encourage daily conversational development through role-playing and multisensory activities that build self-esteem, culminating in year-end Parisian “pique-nique” that celebrate accomplishments.
Physical Education: Dance & Yoga
Physical education develops lasting fitness habits necessary for a healthy lifestyle – for life. The physical education program features countless activities fostering teamwork skills, sportsmanship and character. As part of the curriculum, students take eight weeks of yoga to facilitate their development of body awareness, control, flexibility and coordination.
Chess
Chess immerses students in hours of logic-based thinking while motivating them to become problem-solvers in and outside of the classroom. The program strengthens memory and self-esteem, also teaching children about sportsmanship and the importance of coping positively with failure. Children in kindergarten through fifth grade begin with fundamentals, and increasingly learn more challenging defensive and offensive strategies. Lead by a world-class chess master, instructional sessions are tailored to individual needs. Ultimately, scholastic tournaments take place throughout the year.
Art
The visual arts program places equal weight on self-expression and the appreciation of the arts as the understanding of human cultures. Students become armed with technical and compositional skills necessary to establish individualized visual vocabularies, drawn both from their experience and imagination, which then connect imagery with ideas. The curriculum offers painting, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media collage.
Music
Integral in developing well-rounded students, this program cultures children into becoming musically and intellectually curious. Basic musical concepts such as rhythm, pitch, harmony and improvisation are rehearsed through vocal and instrumental instruction. Students have the opportunity to share their newly developed talents at various assemblies and performances throughout the year.
Complementing a rich music curriculum, the school also offers various extracurricular programs for students of all ages –– from “Mommy and Me” music classes for younger students, to Suzuki violin programs and piano, guitar and woodwinds instruction.
Environmental Education
A key tenet of our school’s mission, sustainability education teaches children hands-on, multisensory outdoor and indoor activities. Each student learns about preserving the living beauty of this bucolic campus, caring properly for chickens, rabbits, and butterflies, as well as gardens. Each day, eggs are collected from the coops and then used in various cooking activities. By learning to take responsibility for our local environment, students develop into global citizens with a propensity for community engagement.
Library
Library time is essential to support the process of learning to read and to give children access to all media. Our library is a place where children are active – so rare in this passive-media world – where they engage with individual books, group stories, other kids and even adults. It is a safe space for all our students, even our toddlers, to practice their independence by asking for help on their own to find a title, check out a book, or even simply wander around alone, making choices about what to read next.
Technology Lab
Our technology lab provides essential time and space to develop skills not directly related to classroom curriculum. These skills can be first learned in the lab. Then mastered through ongoing application at home and in the classroom. Our lab is designed to facilitate a myriad of learning activities and perhaps foremost, collaborative group work.
Robotics
Robotics is introduced to during our First Program level through our Bee-Bot program. This little robot teaches sequencing, estimation, and problem-solving. The program encourages children to use Bee-Bot over and over and inspire them to enter ever more creative and complex command sequences. Our children in Kindergarten and higher, move on to more complex sequencing and beginner coding with Dash and Dot. These highly interactive robots engage our young thinkers with visual coding, self-guided missions and great lessons in teamwork.
Providing children with lessons in robotics, helps them to get prepared for the future as a confident independent person and create a competent and skilled individual for demanding job market. Students always find the practical usage of science, engineering, and arithmetic as fun.