What this looks like
in real life.
Three answers to the three questions families ask in every call. When can my kid start? When do they actually do school? Who will they do it with?
A school year
on your family's clock.
Thirty-eight weeks of live instruction in small group cohorts. A rolling enrollment window from mid-August through mid-October. Off-weeks the family picks, not the calendar.
Start the week after you enroll. Families finishing a tour, breaking a homeschool routine, or transferring mid-fall all slot in without losing the year.
A full academic year of live teaching in small group cohorts, with 1:1 support layered in where it helps. Same total instructional time as a traditional independent school - delivered around your family, not the bell.
Travel in October. Take a week in February. Re-enter without a make-up backlog - your child's pace picks up where they left off because mastery, not seat time, is the measure.
A day that
bends to your child.
Tuesday at 2 PM is piano. Wednesday at 10 AM is when she actually thinks. We schedule around those facts. Live classes run from 7 AM Pacific to 7 PM Pacific - there is always something on.
- Live classes
Six group classes open today across the catalog. Your child picks up to 3 for the term, plus their core academic cohorts.
- Hosted cowork
Two drop-in sessions a day — 9 AM and 1:30 PM — hosted by a Recess adult.
- Homework / Studio
Available when your child is ready to do it.
- 7 AM Acrylic Painting
- 9 AM Animate a Short Film
- 11 AM Spanish
- 1 PM Dungeons & Dragons
- 3 PM Creative Writing
- 5 PM Foundations of Science
- 9 AM Hosted by a Recess adult
- 1:30 PM Hosted by a Recess adult
Homework lives here — your child opens it when they're ready.
Tell us when piano is, when the orthodontist runs late, when your child's energy peaks. We schedule the cohort sessions around that, not the other way.
After each live session, an asynchronous Studio queue: a math set, a writing draft, a reading passage. Done at their pace, on the couch or the kitchen table. Built-in tutor answers in seconds.
Mentor-staffed drop-in rooms run morning, midday, and after school. Body-doubling for the kid who works best with company - or quiet rooms for the kid who doesn't.
After each live session, the teacher drops a small set into your child's Studio — a math problem run, a paragraph to draft, a passage to read aloud. They do it when they're ready, at their pace, with a 24/7 tutor in the corner. The next session picks up exactly where the Studio ended.
Their people
are already here.
Academics are the engine. Community is the rest of the school. Live rooms, moderated threads, and making-things-with-other-kids run on a separate track - so your child has somewhere to show up, and someone to show it to.
Recess Squads run as small, persistent groups - board games, Minecraft worlds, Socratic discussions. Open School Cowork Hour and Teen Hour run on a daily clock so a familiar room is always a click away.
- Recess Squads
- Open School Cowork Hour
- Teen Hour
Moderated interest channels - mathy unschoolers, fiction book club, show-and-tell, regional parent groups. A Recess News feed keeps families looped in without becoming another social app to police.
- Show and Tell
- Mathy Unschoolers
- Recess News
Rolling Challenges give kids an excuse to make - a Minecraft biome, an entry in the Recess Art Book, a short news report. Over 200 challenges across math, music, writing, code, and entrepreneurship - small enough to start today, ambitious enough to end in a published book or a shipped game. The artifacts they finish stack into a portfolio - and often become the building blocks of their end-of-year capstone.
- Recess Art Book
- Minecraft biome briefs
- News report