Name: Alpha Hamptons Summer Camp | Virtual Open House
Uploaded: 2026-05-07T16:46:17.425Z
Duration: 26 min 48 s
Description: Alpha Hamptons Summer Camp | Virtual Open House

Transcript for "Alpha Hamptons Summer Camp | Virtual Open House": Hi everyone. Welcome to the virtual preview for Alpha Summer. I'm excited to have you all here with me and to talk through what we're going to be doing in the Hamptons this summer. So I just wanted to start by saying that Alpha Summer, you know, we don't call it a camp because it is not a camp. Alpha Summer is Alpha and that's why I kind of wanna start this off just conversationally explaining what Alpha is and what we're doing here and what you'll be doing this summer in the what your children will be doing this summer in the Hamptons. So Alpha's number one commitment is that children must love school. And just to provide a little bit of background information about myself, I'm Nancy Torvoon. I direct admissions here in New York, and that number one commitment is what really resonates with me is one of the number one things for me is that love of school. So I started my career as a teacher in the public school system in Scandinavia and I experienced firsthand how that is to be the person in front of the classroom, 22 kids in front of you, each with different needs, whether it be academically or things that you know that are going on at home, all of these different needs that are just impossible to, number one, fully understand as a human being, and number two, to meet all of those needs. So, you know, what we're doing at Alpha is really leveraging AI to deliver that personalized learning so the academics are taken care of. And I'll be diving more into this throughout this session, but we really are unlocking that love of school, that number one commitment, and it permeates everything that we do here. We actually measure ourselves on this. So we poll the children multiple times a year and say, you know, do you love school? And we have extremely high response rates. We're close to 100% for that one, but then we go even further. So we take another step and we say, would you rather be at school than on vacation? And believe it or not, we have about 48% that say they would, rather be at school at Alpha than on vacation. So hey, here's the opportunity this summer at Alpha Summer. And you know they also say it depends on the vacation, which we understand, but 50%, I mean around 50% of kids saying that they'd rather be at school than on vacation is unheard of. For someone coming from years ago teaching in the traditional system, this is unheard of. And that love of school is something that, you know, when you get your master's in education, when you're learning to be a teacher, it is just so fundamental and everybody knows in the educational world that for any learning to happen at all you need to have an environment where children feel safe and happy, and yet it is so forgotten. In any any school that I've ever worked in, I haven't seen it the way that I see it here at Alpha. Like I said, it permeates everything we do and we measure ourselves on this. So to kind of segue into Alpha Summer, you know, being that, half of our children do say that they would rather be at school, than on vacation, we now have Alpha Summer. So I'm going to share a presentation with all of you and kind of walk you through what we're doing this summer and also specifically you'll see week by week what are these workshops, and how is the structure of the day. So I'll be sharing my screen right now and you should see my screen now. So this summer you'll see it says The Odyssey, a nine week summer in the Hamptons, and it's an epic theme. So we are literally going to have an epic summer in the Hamptons, And you'll see two summers in one. So this is also what we're doing at Alpha. I mentioned the personalized academics, and you'll see that on the right side here. Top one to 2% national academic gains. That's what we see at our alpha schools nationally. And I'll dive more into that and what that looks like for the academics and kind of walk through exactly how we do that and what it entails. But then on the left, you'll see what your kid lives, make a surf board, build a guitar, perform for parents, and the Trojan horse. And these relate to the life skills workshop. So this is what the children are doing in the afternoons. And again, we'll be diving into this now and really looking at how exactly this will be for the kids this summer and also how it is at our Alpha schools because this summer is Alpha. So we'll take a look at the academics first. So the learning odyssey, So two hours. We call it core skills. We call it two hour learnings. This is our AI powered personalized academics. And the way that I describe this is, you know, we take AI to do the thing that humans can't do. And I can say this confidently, having been a teacher, having been in the classroom, I have that self awareness of what I could and couldn't do as a human. And, you know, we as humans are subjective. And we may think that we have an idea of what each student needs academically, but really being that we are subjective, it's impossible for us to know and in an objective way, nor do we have the precision that AI has to really map out each child's brain, understand where mastery gaps may be, it can pinpoint them with precision. That is what we have unlocked with time back, which is where our academic learning happens. So this is something that we will do for each child who comes into Alpha Summer. As I said, this is Alpha. So every child who comes in, whether it be for a week, three weeks, the full nine weeks, they will come in and we will get them onto time back. It will put them through a series of evaluations to figure out exactly where their zone of proximal development is in each subject. The zone of proximal development, this is a very technical term. Any, anyone who's in this meeting who might be an educator would know what I'm saying, but I'll explain it for everyone. And the zone of proximal development is I like to describe it like when I go running with my husband, he is always just half a step ahead of me and because of that I'm always pushing harder, running faster, staying motivated. But had he been a whole step ahead of me, I would get frustrated. I might give up. So that would be too challenging. Had he been a whole step behind me, Then that's boring and I might give up because it's just not challenging enough. So it's essentially keeping each child's academics in each subject just that half a step ahead in what we call the 80%, keeping them just challenged enough. Now when you've unlocked that the way that we have with time back, our second commitment is that children learn 2x in just two hours a day. So our children are learning twice as much at Alpha with no homework, mind you, in just two hours a day. And that's not even necessarily something that we set out to do as a goal in and of itself, but it will naturally happen when you've unlocked the power of each child learning in that zone of proximal development in each subject. So this is something that each child who comes into Alpha Summer will get that head start, that academic head start, and also just that full transparency for you as parents and for the child. So coming in and really seeing where am I in each subject? Where might I have gaps? Are there gaps behind grade level? Are there gaps ahead of grade level? And maybe children could just start advancing or filling gaps to get up to grade level. So that is the beauty of this. It's fully personalized. You as parents will get that report. So even if it's just a week, you will see the full transparency of where your child is academically in addition to a plan from Alpha of how it would look to start filling those gaps or filling those gaps ahead of grade level and accelerating onwards. So you will have a full pre post academic report and I would encourage recommend, at least two weeks just because then you get to get through get through the evaluations, get the picture, and then also get started on the personalized learning. So it's such a gift for students who come in the summer and really get to get to have that head start. So really an amazing academic experience for any children who come this summer and again whether it be for a week and you're getting the picture or for at least two weeks and kind of also getting that head start, it will be in my experience in admissions, it typically is eye opening for families. So that's something that I'll be speaking with each of you about throughout the summer, really kind of keeping an eye on that academic report and talking about what that would look like at Alpha too. So that was a little bit about the academics, then we also have the adventure odyssey. So, you know, at Alpha, a big part of the motivational aspect is that we are condensing academics, and we see that when they're working in that zone of proximal development, children don't need to sit in a classroom at a desk for six hours a day listening to a teacher, drone on about whatever the academic subject might be because they're getting their personalized academics. It's condensed and that means that we open up all of this time. This is why we call our system time back. The students are getting time back in the afternoons to learn these amazing life skills through really engaging workshops. Now our life skills are things like public speaking, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship, and a big one is grit. So we have a focus on failure being fuel. So we would this might sound controversial, but we do want your child to fail because we want them to understand that feeling. And it's not just that they fail, but then they get the tools that they need from us to understand, okay, what does it feel like to fail? How do I push through that and how do I use that as fuel to progress onwards? And what a skill to have later in life. I mean all of us as adults, I think we all have these micro failures every day and if it just broke us, what would we do? So learning to kind of work through that and that's something that we incorporate and certainly even for a week in alpha we will have a focus on on building that grit and determination and that really happens in this workshop time. So in the workshop time, we'll focus on life skills, then we also have these exciting experiences for for the other moments in time. We have a big focus on being outdoors this summer in the Hamptons. We really use the local area as our playground. We have a beach five minutes from where the location will be at the Jewish Community Center of East Hampton. We're gonna have a ninja warrior course. So this will be something kids can do daily. The difficulty will get progressively more challenging throughout the summer for the children. And then we also have an on-site pool which we're going to use every day. So kind of some of those more typical summer activities will be built in throughout the day and we want to be outdoors as much as possible. So kind of circling back to the workshops, we have some very exciting workshops in store and something that also permeates Alpha is that we source experts. You know, our guides are the motivational experts and that's what their role will be this summer with your children, understanding each and every child and what motivates that child and how to help them to progress through both the academics and the workshops. But that being said, we don't always have guides that might be master carpenters and that's fine because we source a master carpenter then. So you'll see on the left here, for the Trojan horse or the surfboards that we're building, the cigar box guitars, We find experts, we bring them in, and then our guides collaborate with them. Our guides are there because they really understand the students and the participants this summer. And then we have the experts to really give the students the tools they need to work through these workshops. And then we have, we're going to have so we have a master carpenter coming in. I mentioned the Trojan horse, the guitars. We also have a chef coming in. They're going to be learning how to serve a live dinner service. They'll be foraging. They'll be making pastries. Really learning some important skills. And then you'll see that we have a really exciting partnership this summer with Ryan Serhant. So that will be week seven. In week seven we will be working with Sirhand and the children will really be pitching and selling and doing everything it entails to sell a $20,000,000 home. So we that I you know, we don't even say we believe children are limitless at Alpha. We know that children are limitless at Alpha. We recognize that potential in children and selling a $20,000,000 home, absolutely that's something that children can do and that's what we recognize at Alpha. When you understand the potential of children and really hold them to these high expectations, they rise to the occasion and they can do amazing things and that's what you're going to see this summer in the Hamptons. So here is a typical day this summer. A lot of people probably want to know specifics, you know, what is the schedule, what will this be like for my kid on a day to day basis. So just to get into the details, at 08:45 drop off, we do have transportation options. So if you're interested in that, please reach out to me and let me know, where you're located and that you're interested in transportation and we will make sure that we arrange for that. And then after 08:45, we go into the limitless launch at 09:00. So this is something, you know, again this is Alpha. This is what we do at Alpha. We start the day at 09:00 with a limitless launch or 08:45 actually here in New York. But it starts with a limitless launch and this is what we call kind of you can think Tony Robbins for kids. It's a really inspirational motivational way of starting the day, a fifteen minute session that's a high energy kickoff. And, you know, when you're working in that zone of proximal development in the academic time, this is so helpful and important for children to kind of get into that mindset through that launch so that at 09:15 they go into core skills. CoreSkills is on TimeBack, that AI powered platform, which is proprietary by the way. And I saw a question came in the chat here about that. It's called TimeBack. It's our own proprietary software developed over many years. I'd like to say at Alpha, we were doing AI before AI was cool. So it's very, very, impressive. So going into TimeBack for core skills, we use the Pomodoro method. The Pomodoro method is proven to be very effective not only for kids, also for adults. So take notes. So it's twenty five minute focused working sessions with a clear set of goals. And this is also outlined in a very visual way for the students and time back. They see their twenty five minute sessions in each subject in the form of, it looks like rings essentially, where they're earning x XP, it's gamified and really motivational for them to work through this time. So twenty five minute academic blocks is what they're working on. So in between those Pomodoros, as we call them, are breaks. So they'll have a twenty five minute focused working session. They will close that computer. They'll get up. They'll move around. They'll take a full mental and physical break from working in that zone of proximal development before then locking in for the next Pomodoro, and we do four of those. So with the breaks in between, that will get you into lunchtime. Lunchtime is at 11:45 and we have that we have a catered lunch every day. We provide the lunch, and that's also a social moment for kids to sit and talk and talk about, you know, did you fill your rings? It's often what we hear at Alpha and just that really positive, support to each other about working through those academics. So lunch will be 11:45 to 12:30. And then from 12:30 to 01:15, there will be a physical adventure. So these are the outdoor activities that I outlined earlier, and that's that pool that we have on-site. It's the ninja warrior course. It's the beach that's five minutes away and really building in, sports. And I see that a couple of people have asked about the grades, so I just want to quickly address that before continuing through the schedule. We support rising pre k four through ninth grade. So any student between rising pre k four and ninth grade, we have we can accommodate for and the workshops will be tailored for the different groups but each group will have amazing workshop. We hold all children to high standards and understand that even a rising PreK four is limitless and has that potential. So after the visit to dive back into the schedule now, after the physical adventure there will be workshops and that will be the week's challenge with the week's expert. So for example, like week seven I mentioned with the really exciting partnership with Ryan Serhan and selling that $20,000,000 house. You know, that's gonna be a big financial literacy one, entrepreneurship, public speaking, storytelling, all of those life skills will be built into that week's challenge and the week's expert would be Ryan Serhan and I do believe he is coming in that Friday by the way, so exciting news. So that's an example of how that block would be from 01:15 to 03:45. Now what we do at all alphas, we wrap up every day, and we're gonna do this at alpha summer two, with a moment of shout outs, and that is a fifteen minute session where we bring the kids together, all levels, all ages, they all come together and then they come up one at a time and they they don't have to. They volunteer. Typically, there's so many hands up for this that it takes more than fifteen minutes sometimes because there's so much engagement, but they come up and they give each other shout outs. So that can look like one student and sometimes this is even eighth graders to kindergartners saying, today I noticed that you, Kate, showed a lot of grit and determination when you fell off of the rock wall and the Ninja Warrior course five times and you just got up again every time and that is showing grit and determination. So they really direct it to another student something that they noticed that was really positive throughout the day and they tie it to a life skill. And it's such an amazing moment to see and it's really, it's beautiful to see. It's a great way to wrap up each day building that positive social environment. And you'll see here a little bit more detail of what exactly we'll be doing through each week. So earlier I said, you know, if you come for one week, I recommend at least two weeks if you come for the whole nine weeks. This is you can and that's how this works. You can choose week one and week four. You can choose week one and week eight or multiples. So it's kind of a choose as as you would like, throughout the summer or you could choose all nine weeks. And I'll dive a little bit more into what exactly kind of the pricing is around that and that will be towards the end of this preview. But to look at each individual week and what will be happening throughout the summer, if you come in week one it's going to be survivor themed. It's going to be really exciting. There will be Tribes, there will be Immunity Challenges, and Tribal Council. Now these themes are related to our Life Skills Workshops. Of course the academics are happening in the morning, just to be clear, academics first, and then these themed workshops in the afternoon. So Week one: survivor. Week two was that dinner service I mentioned earlier in the conversation. It was that, learning how to do a live dinner service. So, really focused around that. And then week three, they'll be having an interactive museum. There will be pottery. There will be safe weapon making. There will be lanterns and bowls that they sculpt. In week four, they're going to be building a trebuchet, having fighter kites. There's gonna be a kite combat bracket. Trebuchet accuracy at distance will be measured. Week five, surfing. The kids are going to be making their own surfboards. So there will be, and again tailored by age, so these are kind of a sampling of what the workshops will be with these different themes. Week six, shadow puppets and movie trailer. There's going to be a premiere of a student made movie trailer, for the student shadow puppet show. Week seven, I've talked a little bit about Sirhan Open House and also I've this is one where if you are interested in that week, I would encourage signing up kind of immediately because we are filling up. This is a really popular one. So week eight is the music show. They're gonna be making different instruments. There's gonna be a live concert and a showcase. And then week nine is the Trojan horse week. So this is that final week where they will be literally building a huge Trojan horse. They're gonna climb into it. It's gonna be wheeled onto the beach and, of course, very safely, and then the children will come out of the horse, and then it will be a bonfire on the beach. And this is a week where we will invite all of the families that have been at any week throughout the summer in for that final Friday to come and experience this. So speaking of those Fridays, Fridays are for parents to come in and see what these different workshops have entailed throughout the week. So every Friday, there's going to be a showcase, and we will invite you parents in to see what your child has accomplished throughout the week. Now the academics are fully transparent. You're going to be able to log in throughout the week, see how they're progressing, and I will also be personally providing you with the academic report of what the status is, kind of where those gaps might be, and how they've started filling them. And then this is that Trojan horse. That's the finale. So that final Friday, all of the families will be invited in and it will be a big bonfire and a very exciting experience. So here are the weeks, the pricing, and where to find us. So as I mentioned, you can select your week. It can be week one and week five, it can be week one, two, and five, and you can just choose and mix and match as it suits your plans for this summer. We have a few weeks that are very close to hitting capacity, so I just want to give everyone a heads up about that. Week seven, as I mentioned, for the SIRHAN open house, of course, that's a very big one, almost at capacity there. Weeks eight, nine, and one and two, we have a little bit more room in weeks three, four, and five, but also a lot of a lot of interest. I mean, this is an amazing experience, so you can imagine the popularity. But I just wanted to give a heads up about weeks one and two, seven, eight and nine. There's not much room left. So if you are interested in those weeks in particular, I would definitely, sign up probably today, before it is full. So we run we run through June 29 through August 28, 08:45 to four, Monday through Friday with transportation options, rising pre k four through grade nine. The cutoff for pre k four turning four by September 1 is what we're looking for, similarly to, the academic year. And for the investment, and you know this is an investment, it's really understanding where your child is academically, getting that transparency, and as I mentioned before this is sometimes shocking and certainly eye opening for parents. When you come in and you have the ability to understand exactly what your child needs academically, where they are, you know, in the time based traditional system, children are pushed through one year at a time without ever really stopping and understanding how the where the mastery is and how the mastery is progressing, and that's what you're getting from us. You're going to see outlined what grade level has my child been placed at, and not only that, but where specifically might there be gaps, and we outline that for you. And then also the progression plan and getting that head start this summer. So it is an investment, and it is for one week, it would be $4,500. When you choose multi weeks, it's $4,000 a week. We also have a sibling discount. Lunch is included. Transportation is included. And I saw there was a question about the lunch. We have a big focus on nutrition here, so I assure you it will be a nutritious, delicious lunch. So the next steps would be to choose your week. I've already mentioned those that are kind of more time sensitive. Register online. It's just a quick firm form, and we'll be confirming within twenty four hours that you've gotten your spot, and confirm and prepare. So also any questions that you might have, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to meet with you, have that conversation about your child in particular. If you're wondering if it's a fit, do not hesitate to reach out, and I can help you really walk you through what this is and who a great fit would be. So please don't hesitate to reach out. We will be having a couple more virtual previews. I think there are only two more planned just being that we are approaching the summer and we are almost full. One to two more previews, but for right now that was it that was it for today. So I hope that you got a really good idea of what we'll be doing this summer. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen now and I'm going to log off. I just wanted to say thank you for coming in today and I hope that you have a better picture of how this summer will be in the Hamptons and I would be really happy to to meet your children and to meet you all there. And again reach out with any questions and I'm happy to help. So thank you everyone. I'll be jumping into the chat now. Please continue asking questions. Even after 12:30 I'll be here, answering. So thank you so much everyone.