What does this look like week to week?
We meet on Tuesdays, September - May, alternating between Class Days, Nature Days, and occasional field trips.
Class Days
Class Days are the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays at Mill City Church in Northeast Minneapolis from 10am-1:30pm.
For Students:
Our Class Days focus on collaborative learning and community building within age groups. We begin with a whole group gathering time and then students disperse into classes based on age. Our day consists of three class periods and a lunch period.
Nursery: Our littlest Hive members (0-2 years old) spend their Class Days in our nursery playing with open-ended toys, reading stories, singing songs, playing games, and creating simple art projects.
PreK/K: Our PreK/K class is for 3 year olds - Kindergarten. The class is play-based and story-based. The children often start class in circle time with songs, rhymes, and a fairytale/fable. The remainder of their class time is spent rotating freely through stations with crafts, arts, games, books, and free-play. They also have one hour of gym class where they play games and get their wiggles out.
Elementary - Middle School: Our 1st-8th grade students rotate between a gym class, a homeroom class (focused on collaborative/group skills and presentation/communication skills), and an elective class (changing each semester). Some of the electives we’ve offered have been:
Art: Styles of Famous Illustrators
Artists Inspired by Nature
The Five Themes of Geography
Sections of Science
Gameschool
Human Body Lab
Simple Machines
The Art of Storytelling
Theater Explorers
Discovering Nutrition
High School: We offered our first high school classes in the 2025-2026 school year for a small group of students. Due to current student needs, we have decided to put our high school classes on hold for the 2026-2027 school year. We are planning to use this year to prepare for a relaunch of our high school classes in the 2027-2028 school year when we will have a handful of current students ready to move into 9th grade. We are excited to grow this area of our co-op and we have a lot of ideas for how to implement a high school program that fits our mission and can be accomplished whether we have small or large number of students. Please reach out to us if you would like to discuss this further and hear more about our hopes for our future high schoolers.
Lunch: We all break for lunch on our Class Days. Students eat a bag lunch from home together in their age groups. This gives them more opportunities to build deeper relationships with one another.
For Parents/Guardians:
Each parent/guardian volunteers two class periods, out of the three, at least one of those hours in a teaching or co-teaching role. The third hour is for parents to socialize and support each other in the Parent Lounge.
Nature Days
Nature Days are the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays at Springbrook Nature Center in Fridley. They include opportunities for learning formally and informally with an emphasis on curiosity, necessity, and awe. Through Nature Days, children not only build knowledge of their environment, but also increase physical activity, build confidence, develop creativity, and learn resilience. We meet in any weather that is not considered unsafe. Most Nature Days begin with a short gathering followed by student-led exploration of different centers and free-play.
A few times per year we have a Naturalist-led program related to our current topics.
At the end of each season, we celebrate with a festival that showcases things we have learned on both Class Days and Nature Days while also including crafts, games, dancing, and a Makers’ Market for the students to sell their handmade wares.
Field Trips
When there is a 5th Tuesday of the month, we offer an optional field trip that our members may choose to attend. A few of the field trips we have offered include:
an apple orchard
a nature center
the Science Museum of Minnesota
Snapology
