Your Learner-Loved Lower School
A structured, joyful program for 4th & 5th graders with daily live workshops, real projects, and top-notch coaches invested in your child’s growth.
Prisma
Lower School At a
Glance
Accreditation
Grades 4-5: Academics
The year is organized into six 6-week themes—like Playology, Unsolved Mysteries, and Food Lab—covering science, social studies, and more through creative tasks and hands-on projects. Learners have daily instruction in their theme project, plus reading, writing, and math.
Geography
Tuition
Tuition is $11,190 per academic year with scholarship reductions up to 40%. Parent-Led program is $5,350. More on affordability here.
The Prisma Difference
Our Project-Based Learning Model
Themes
Daily Workshops
Projects
What is a Theme?
A theme is a 6-week project-based adventure through a new topic—toy design, unsolved mysteries, the science of food. Each theme covers an intentional blend of school subjects, unfolding through daily workshops and a hands-on project.
Daily Workshops
About 3 hours of live instruction each day: theme workshops, plus dedicated literacy and math time. Coaches introduce new concepts, lead fun games and collaboration, and set learners up for their independent work.
Independent Tasks and Projects
Daily independent tasks build toward a hands-on project for each theme—remixing fairy tales, designing board games, building ecosystem models. Coaches give feedback directly in their work; learners revise and grow. Along the way, they earn Badges showing exactly which skills they’ve mastered.
"It’s about more than loving learning. We want them to love the doing. Prisma kids take what they learn and make something real in the world: whether it's a new product, business, art, piece of writing. They relish the hard part of taking action and starting, getting messy during the process. They feel totally empowered to build and create and leave the world better than they found it."
Emily Skolnick, Head of Learning Innovation
#LearnForRealLife
Prisma Learners' Real World Projects
A Place to Grow, Laugh, and Belong
At this age, feeling safe and known matters as much as academics. When they join Prisma Lower School, your learner is carefully matched with a small cohort of peers, led by a coach they can stay with for multiple years.
Each day starts with Standup and ends with Send Off, with learning together in between. Coaches make space for the little moments that build bonds, from meeting each other’s pets to singing “Happy Birthday.”
Learners make friends, get silly, build confidence, and have teammates cheering them on.
What is a cohort?
Your Classroom Your Collaborators Your People
Goal Setting
Joke Making
Have Your Back You Can Do This Crew
Kids need mentors who celebrate, challenge, and invest in them
Remember that life-changing teacher whose impact you still feel today? Those are the educators you’ll meet at Prisma. We hire less than 1% of applicants, because we’re looking for educators who excel both at building relationships with kids and partnering with parents to create a personalized experience for each family.
Your child’s Mentor Coach leads their daily workshops (Standup, Send Off, theme, and literacy)—plus gives feedback, personalizes the curriculum to your learner, and meets with them 1:1. Learners also work with a specialized Math Coach for dedicated math instruction.
A Typical
Week
Overview
Our Lower School program is highly interactive and structured. ⅔ of each school day is spent live with coaches, with the other ⅓ for independent project-based work.
Exact times vary by time zone and cohort placement. Chat with us 1-on-1 to explore how Prisma could work with your family’s schedule.
Daily Standup
The first workshop of the day is many learners’ favorite! Coaches share important announcements, lead community building and social-emotional activities, and set learners up for a great day ahead.
Theme Workshops
Daily workshops Monday-Thursday where learners build the skills needed to support independent work on their theme project. For example, in Playology, workshops might include hands-on physics simulations and collaborative design workshops as learners work on their toy inventions.
Math
Learners attend 4x/week workshops with their Math Coach and peer groups working at similar levels. These sessions blend direct instruction with collaborative problem-solving, allowing learners to tackle engaging mathematical challenges while receiving targeted teaching when needed. Outside of workshops, Lower School learners complete daily personalized math practice and complete Math missions to earn Badges.
Literacy
Learners complete daily, structured practice in reading and writing, building toward a final writing product tied to the cycle’s theme, with skills progressing from sentence structure and writing process to multi-paragraph and persuasive pieces. Each cycle includes a shared text—spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—discussed in daily Literacy Workshops alongside collaborative writing and skill-building activities.
Daily Send Off
Lower School learners end each day with their coach and cohort in a 30-minute Send Off session. This daily check-in allows learners to share progress on that day’s work, receive support, and celebrate achievements. Note: Send Off is for full program learners only—Parent Coach learners receive this daily accountability at home.
Fridays
Fridays remain school days but with no required workshops—instead, this time is meant for catching up on work, connecting with peers, joining optional clubs and enrichments, or focusing on personal interests.
“Just be yourself. There's definitely gonna be someone at Prisma that likes the same stuff you like.”
Sophie, Grade 4
