Before & after school
Enrichment & After-Care
Calm hours on either side of the school day, in rooms your child already knows, with adults who know your child.
For working families
The bookends of the day, done properly.
A lot of after-care runs on a simple formula: a screen, a snack, and a countdown to pickup. We run ours differently, because your child is still at school, and school should hold its standard until the last car leaves.
Enrichment at Montessori School of Fairfax opens the building at 7:00 a.m. and stays with your child until 6:00 p.m. The rooms are the ones your child works in all day. The shelves hold real materials. And the pace stays deliberately gentle, because early mornings and late afternoons are when children need calm the most.
If both parents work, a school day that ends mid-afternoon is not a schedule. It is a problem to solve. Enrichment solves it without asking your child to spend the extra hours in a holding room.
How it works
Early mornings, unhurried afternoons.
Before-care starts at 7:00 a.m. in a calm, low-lit room, with books, puzzles, and a table for a child who did not finish breakfast at home. A child who arrives early does not sit and wait for the day to start. She turns pages in a lap, finishes a puzzle on a rug, and walks into her classroom already settled, which is the difference between a good morning and a rushed one.
Afternoons follow the same logic in reverse. After a full day of concentration, children need air, movement, and something worth doing with their hands. Some go straight to the garden or the easel; others carry a morning work back to a mat to finish it. The afternoon offers real choices, and children pick among them the same way they choose their morning work, then put each thing away when they are done.
- Art at a stocked shelf, with real brushes and real clay
- Garden beds the children plant, water, & tend themselves
- Music, movement, and read-alouds in small groups
- Quiet work time for children who want to continue a project
Same people, same standards
The last hour is still the real school.
Enrichment is staffed by adults your child already knows, and it runs on the classroom's expectations: care for the room, care for each other, and finish what you start.
- Familiar faces, so the end of the day never feels like a handoff
- The same ground rules as the classroom, kept gently and consistently
- Real materials and real work, never a screen parked in the corner
- A calm room, because tired children do not need more stimulation
The difference shows at pickup. Instead of collecting an overstimulated child from a loud room, you step into the last minutes of something: a drawing being finished, a watering can being emptied, a game being put away. The drive home starts calm because the afternoon was calm.
Practical notes
Built around the way families actually live.
Enrichment is open to enrolled children across our programs, Toddler through Elementary. Bring your scheduling questions when you Schedule a Visit, check the FAQ for answers about drop-off and pickup, or contact us and we will walk you through what a typical week looks like for a family with your hours. The best way to judge the last hour of our day is to stand in it, near pickup, and watch how a tired room actually sounds. After-care draws families from across the towns we serve who need coverage until 6:00 p.m.
And when June arrives, the rhythm does not have to stop. Our Summer Program keeps the same campus, the same calm, and the same standard through the warm months.