Before and After School Program

Our leadership team consists of educators who are also parents that understand skills associated with an “innovative mindset” have a very high correlation with improved academic outcomes. We believe that such skills should be taught and practiced in a fun and exciting way, and our approach is a balanced one, offering the District a variety of choices when it comes to teaching the skills associated with Innovation. Our full-service program marries traditional features of before and after school programs, such as a focus on child safety, program licensing, snack, and the inclusion of a play-based curriculum, with a 21st Century twist. Each day offers a variety of different activities that fall into one of these four categories:

Academic Support

Licensed teachers not only check for accuracy and completion of homework, but also possess the expertise to ensure student understanding. Parents love that their child can complete their homework before pick-up. This ensures that families can spend more quality time together, and that teachers see positive impact in the classroom the next day.

Recreation and Physical Fitness

Students need opportunities to get out and move! The Innovation Learning recreation component helps students have fun with fitness and build critical social skills. Schools can choose from various program elements such as our Discovery Play, Fun Fitness, and Daily SWITCH programs to engage students in simulations, role-play, sports, and games. By providing eclectic opportunities, we offer a program that children embrace and want to attend.

STEM Learning

Our STEM curriculum has been designed and developed by our experienced STEM Team. Together they have created a fun and engaging experience that serves to enhance STEM concepts and skills associated with innovation in a way that children enjoy and love. The result is Innovation Stations , a program that bridges the digital divide for students who might not have regular access to technology but also offers those that do have access an opportunity to use technology in new and different ways.

Play

Research proves that PLAY is a powerful tool to engage students in 21st Century Skills. With this in mind, we integrate play elements throughout our entire program and provide special attention to this process through various program elements, such as our Free Play and TINKER Time . All our Play Periods include supervised structured and unstructured time for students to use their imagination to learn, practice and incorporate creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills into their everyday life.

Design Thinking

Based on human-centered design theory and the engineering design process, we challenge our students to become better at empathizing, asking questions, ideating, prototyping, and testing their ideas so that they understand and believe that all problems can be solved. By introducing this mindset of curiosity, bias towards action, reframing, mindfulness of process, and radical collaboration, we can empower them to solve both their daily problems and problems facing their community.

“Innovation Learning is an extended learning provider that offers the children in their care more than just a safe place to be after school. Their philosophy is to provide students a true extension of their school day in a fun, creative way.”

The Innovation Learning Day

Our program has been designed to promote active participation while helping children to experience increased control of their own learning. Over decades as career educators, we have crafted the ideal framework that marries structured programming, research based and skill-building methods with adaptable, creative frameworks that allow children to become innovators.

We offer a flexible format, so students can make choices about what and how they learn during their before and after school program. Coupled with the training we provide to our staff, teaching them to act as learning facilitators, our programs better position students for success.

SWITCH leverages the Responsive Classroom approach and the Choose Love curriculum, which emphasize social and emotional growth through a variety of daily interactive activities. Choose Love centers on four important character values – Courage, Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Compassion in Action – which cultivates optimism, resilience, and personal responsibility. Responsive Classroom focuses on academic success and social-emotional learning in grades K-8. The approach’s four key domains are engaging academics, positive community, effective management, and developmental awareness. We utilize simulation, role play, and fun games from both curricula to build community while teaching social skills and a sense of mastery, generosity, belonging, and independence for our students.

Consistent with our emphasis on Gold Standard Project Based Learning, Innovation Learning has partnered with Children’s Hospital in Colorado, the Design for Community Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and EcosySTEM Arts to develop a yearly challenge. During this challenge, thousands of Innovation Learning students from across the country invent fun and interactive prototypes of STEM toys for health impacted kids at Children’s Hospital, Colorado.

Over two weeks, they research the problem and brainstorm wild ideas. Staff guides students to produce working prototypes of the products, which are tested and improved during our after school programs. Students communicate their solutions in a variety of methods, including school-wide assemblies, learning fairs, newsletters, technical drawings, photos, and video. They continue this process throughout the school year with the help of CU engineering students who assist them in refining and prototyping their ideas. The project culminates when EcosySTEM ARTS, a collection of passionate community members and college students who strive to deliver meaningful education experiences for health impacted children, bring the ideas and prototypes into the hospital interacting with patients.

Our STEM curriculum has been designed and developed by our Curriculum Team. They created a fun experience that serves to enhance STEM concepts and skills associated with innovation in a way that children enjoy and love.

Our STEM-based program incorporates the Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning (PBL) Gold Standard format. Robotics, electrical engineering, coding, gaming, engineer design process, flight, and chemistry are a few areas of focus. We also incorporate play, movement, discovery, teambuilding, and interaction with multiple forms of technology to help teach and practice skills that foster innovation. The result is a program that bridges the digital divide for students that might not have regular access to technology, but also offers those that do have access an opportunity to use technology in new and different ways.

Schools are unique when it comes to how they each approach homework. Some schools give very little while others give large amounts. Regardless of the camp you are in, Innovation Learning can offer just the right level of support. Our homework program goes beyond a simple homework club. We incorporate licensed teachers who provide the expertise necessary to ensure students not only complete their homework but understand it. They check for accuracy, and completion, so children can enjoy quality family time each evening and are prepared for school the next day.

We embrace a holistic approach to before and after school programs, and this includes the need for students to have both a healthy body and a healthy mind. Our goal is for students to participate in a minimum of 60 minutes per day in physical fitness activities. All of our morning programs include fun fitness, which incorporates San Diego State University’s SPARK (Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids) approach. We add a minimum of 30 minutes of fitness programming as part of our afternoon programs. Each school district can also add up to 60 minutes of fitness time to their afternoon programs if desired.

Daily, vigorous outdoor play, team building, and discovery activities are essential to engaging mind and body. Children are physically active in a structured play time that includes games that foster collaboration, curiosity, communication and creative problem solving. Students practice innovative thinking through gaming and sports. By developing games using a set of predetermined materials, they learn and use the Sprint Method, a process Google developed for answering critical questions through design, prototyping, and testing to create and adapt the games they develop. Students engage in teambuilding games to accomplish a common goal. Upon completion, they debrief within their group and collaborate on how to best present their accomplishment to the rest of their peers.

At Innovation Learning, we offer TINKER time for children so they can investigate topics of their choice while subsequently developing solutions to everyday problems. TINKER Time allows students to pick their own projects and learning outcomes, while still hitting all the standards and skills for their grade level.

Art, Drama, STEM based enrichment activities, such as robotics, coding, computer gaming, karate, guitar, piano, drama, visual arts and some sports are all included in our program at no extra charge for those students enrolled in our regular after school program.

Based upon our relationships that with national providers, we can offer a catalog of additional on-site and online enrichments such as Band, Orchestra, Violin, Golf, Tennis, etc. Most of these enrichments require extra equipment and are more specialized. Premium Enrichments do carry an additional charge. We make Premium Enrichments available to the entire student community (not just those who attend our programs). Where implemented, these classes offer additional choices for students to expand their interests.