Saturdays · 1–5 PMAges 7–13$25 to register · free for members
The same kids, every Saturday. That is the whole trick.
Four hours a week where the activity changes and the people do not. Cooking one week, circuits and code the next: with the same faces around the table each time, which is how friendships actually form.
- Cost
- $25 once · free for members
- To sign up
- Free NEXGEN account required
- Next step
- Register once for the programme
- If cost is the problem
- Ask us, there is a scholarship fund How it works
Why weekly
A one-off workshop is a nice afternoon. It is not a friendship.
Most Saturday programming is a menu: book the pottery one, book the coding one, meet nine children you will never see again, go home. The child had a good time and nothing carried.
Saturday Sessions is built the other way round. You register once and then it is simply your Saturday, so by week four your child walks into a room where three people say their name before they have taken their coat off.
The activity is the excuse. The room is the product.
What they actually do
It changes every week, on purpose.
Enough variety that a child finds the thing they are unexpectedly good at, and enough repetition that they get to be good at it in front of people who noticed.
Make something
Cooking, building, making a mess with a purpose and clearing it up afterwards.
Figure something out
Code, puzzles, science that involves standing back from it. Getting it wrong first is part of the design.
Get outside
Games, teams, the kind of running about that a Saturday indoors quietly removes from a childhood.
Do something for someone else
Service projects where the beneficiary is real and local, not an abstraction in a worksheet.
Hour by hour
What a Saturday Session looks like.
Four hours with the same kids every week. It is a cohort, not a drop-in. That is why the friendships stick.
1:00 PMDoors and check-in
Front desk check-in, coats off, straight into the room. Same faces as last week.
1:15 PMWhat we are making today
Five minutes on the plan, so nobody is confused. Cooking, coding, a story workshop, a service project, or a guest. It rotates each term.
2:00 PMThe main session
The long block, in small groups. Hands busy. Adults alongside, not at the front.
3:15 PMBreak and snack
Off the tables, something to eat, run around.
3:30 PMGames or outdoors
Unstructured on purpose, after a structured block. Weather decides inside or out.
4:30 PMShow what you made
Everyone sees everyone’s work. Short, and it is why the making gets taken seriously.
4:50 PMWrap and pickup
Back to the front desk. Out at 5:00.
Good to know
- Built for Kids and Tweens, roughly ages 7–13.
- The same group runs all term. Register for the run, not one Saturday.
- Themes rotate: cooking, coding, outdoor games, story workshops, service projects, guests.
- Check-in and pickup both happen at the front desk, so there is a record of who collected whom.
Straight answers
What Saturday Sessions is not.
Not weekend school
No syllabus, no homework, no assessment. Nobody is behind.
Not a pick-and-mix
You register once rather than booking week by week. Coming most weeks is what makes the friendships possible, and a place held empty is a place another child could not have.
Not childcare
Four supervised hours is a genuine benefit and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is just not what the programme is designed around.
Not the same four hours every week
The people repeat. The activity does not.
Trust
Ages 7 to 13 is a wide span. We do not run it as one room.
A seven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old need different supervision, different activities and different amounts of freedom.
Grouped by age, not pooled
Kids (7–10) and Tweens (11–13) work separately for the activity itself, and come together for the parts where a mixed room is the point.
Ratios matched to the state standard, by choice
At least one adult per ten for the under-nines and one per fifteen above that. NEXGEN is a youth programme rather than a licensed child-care centre, so we are not required to hold those numbers: we adopt them anyway, because the bar should be someone else’s, not one we set for ourselves.
Every adult background-checked
The full three-part New York screening before any unsupervised contact, volunteers on the same basis as paid staff.
Check-in and pickup at the desk
Both recorded. You name who may collect your child, and that permission is yours to revoke.
If you are the kid
You will probably make something you want to take home.
Some Saturdays it is food. Some Saturdays it is a circuit that lights up, or a team game where the whole room is shouting. You do not have to be good at any of it before you arrive.
The same people are there every week, so after a couple of Saturdays you will already know who to sit next to.
Bring a friend the first time if that makes it easier. Most people do.
Before you register
What parents ask about Saturdays.
$25 to register, once, not per Saturday. After that your child comes as often as they like, and a membership carries no per-child surcharge: one flat family price covers every child you have. Members pay less — sign in and the page shows your household’s actual price rather than a list one.
This Saturday
Come once and see if they ask about the next one.
That is the only test that matters. Register, come to one, and see whether Sunday morning brings a question about next week.