8 Cool Classes to Sign Up For in Toronto

In the spirit of doing amazing things, we bring you eight cool classes for the masses that are slightly out of the ordinary…just like your kids.

The Seasons Family Centre is perfect for the whole family. It offers three spaces: an art studio, a kitchen, and an interactive play/yoga and Pilates area. So while your preschooler is taking a hip-hop class, and your school-ager is learning how to make miniature houses, you can be honing your skills in a photography course. We'd love this concept in any season.

4Cats Arts Studio offers age-appropriate art classes for kids (and adults), including their successful Artist of the Month classes which run for up to seven weeks. These fun and focused sessions immerse and educate participants in the life and style of the masters, including Van Gogh and Warhol. Along with classes in clay and sculpting, drawing and mixed media, they also offer workshops, camps and birthday parties throughout the year.

What happens in Vegas doesn't have to stay in Vegas. Toronto's School of Circus Arts offers Sin City-style circus aerobatics for kids. But it's far more than just kids clowning around. Starting at age five with an aerial and acrobatics class, kids can learn static trapeze, silk ropes and aerial hoops along with tumbling and hand balancing. Think of it as a mini Cirque in the city.

At the Freehand School of Art, creativity is unleashed through drawing, painting, sculpting and mixed media. Run by a mom and daughter team, former elementary and visual arts teachers, the small inventive art classes (for ages 4 and up) in a bright studio in North Toronto offer an interactive educational element in each class which then inspires the creative craft to be completed afterwards. It'll make an impression on any future impressionist or modern artist(s) to be.

Before Glee and Gaga, the hills were alive with the sound of music. Our kids may not be in high school, or have any idea who Julie Andrews is (did we just date ourselves?), but a vocal vocation may be inspired by Bravo School of Music, located at Yonge and Bloor, which offers a free children's music choir program for children ages four and up. Individual attention is given to each student, but the main focus is on the choir as a whole, with an amazing performance at the end of the session.

So you think you can sew? When the creative role-modelling in your home is exemplified by a badly sewn-on button, it's probably time to take a future designing diva to a professional. Sew Be It offers classes for boys and girls ages 8 to 16 where they'll learn to hand-stitch, use a sewing machine, make a pattern and more. Being sew-savvy is definitely in fashion.

It may be a tough climb, but eventually kids grow up. While they're inching up the growth chart, introduce them to a lifelong love of scaling up real surfaces at a rock climbing class for kids. Toronto Climbing Academy offers instructive lessons for young climbers ages 4 and up with classes that offer the fundamentals of climbing and safety as they scale up the wall.

Supporting your children's desire for drum lessons? Good. Someone else listening to, teaching about and storing the drums? Better. Bavia Arts Studio, located in the St. Clair West village, is the best, with drumming classes offered for ages 18 months to 7 years. Brazilian drumming lessons allow kids to be 'obnoxiously' loud, while learning rhythm and songs on a range of drums, shakers and bells, with everyone participating to the max.