Third Bend Studio

09/05/2026

Our very first Studio Saturday is here! We’re open until 11:30!

Come spend a Saturday morning making, playing, exploring, and getting a little messy with us at Third Bend Studio. We’ll have coffee for the grownups and plenty of materials, space, and invitations to create for the kids.

First adult + child: $20
Additional adults: $5
Additional children: $10

We’d love to see you and your people!

516 N. Locust Street, Denton

09/03/2026

A little glimpse into the kind of art-making happening in Third Bend’s preschool and afterschool programs…

Our approach to process art is simple: Give children choices, make lots of materials available, offer an invitation, and see where they take it.

Children self-select materials, follow their own ideas, experiment with tools and techniques, and often take an idea somewhere we never could have predicted. Sometimes our invitation is a new material, sometimes it’s a question or a provocation—and sometimes it’s just making sure there is enough paint, tape, clay, paper, glitter, and interesting things around to spark an idea.

We’re excited to make this kind of open-ended, wonderfully messy art available during our preschool and afterschool programs, and now on Family Saturdays, too. Check us out at thirdbendstudio.com

Come make art, community, and mess with us!

09/02/2026

It might become a snake. A worm. A road. A trail. A belt - or a ‘head belt’. Something to follow, bend, stretch, connect, or wonder about.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been watching an interest in lines weave its way through our studio — into drawings and sculptures, snakes and worms, yarn and string, movement, books, small world play, and conversations between children. We’ve been collecting pieces of that thinking in our library so children can revisit what they’ve made, notice each other’s ideas, and keep the investigation moving.

This is one of our favorite parts of an emergent curriculum: we don’t have to decide where an idea is going before children get there. We get to notice what catches their attention, offer materials and experiences that invite them deeper, and see what they do next.

Right now at Third Bend, there are a whole lot of lines slithering somewhere. 🐍

We’re growing our little community, too. If you’re looking for a preschool or afterschool space in Denton where play, curiosity, creativity, and children’s ideas are taken seriously, we’d love for you to come see what we’re building at Third Bend Studio. Find out more about us on our website, thirdbendstudio.com, or check us out this Saturday for our family studio time.

09/01/2026

We are so excited to open the studio for our very first Saturday of playing, making, building, exploring, and being together this week on September 5th from 8:30-11:30.

We’ll have 30 spots available for children + their grown-ups to come spend the morning at Third Bend. Bring your family, bring your friends, meet some new ones while you’re here, and come see what happens when we fill the studio with a whole community of people ready to play.

Booking link is below, we hope to see you this weekend!

08/30/2026

Third Bend Studio has a website! Come learn more about our third space for children and families; find out more about our philosophy, preschool program, and afterschool extracurricular opportunities. At thirdbendstudio.com you can meet our team, enroll in our programming, sign up for family Saturday studio sessions, submit celebration requests, check out our community partnerships, and more.

Have you worked with us before? We'd love your help building our testimonial page! If you reach out to us with a quick comment or blurb about your experience with the Third Bend Studio team, it will greatly support us in connecting with new families. Thank you!

08/29/2026

Snakes, dragons, and Ninja Turtles — oh my!!

Third Bend Studio just wrapped up our second week with our preschool class and afterschool studio time, and wow — we’re amazed.

Watching this community of children develop in a space and time that truly belongs to them has been kind of life-changing. They move through the studio with so much excitement and ownership, finding curiosity, stories, questions, and ideas everywhere they look. And that excitement spreads. Ideas get picked up by other children, stories grow, materials take on new meanings, and the energy builds between them. It’s a beautiful thing to witness, and we’ve felt so lucky to learn and grow alongside this community.

One of the strongest shared interests we’ve documented so far is a deep fascination with reptiles and amphibians — snakes especially! We’ve also started noticing so many connections between this interest and our larger inquiry into lines. Can you spot some of them?

We’ve captured a few of the small-world scenes, artwork, experiments, stories, and ideas around reptiles that have been emerging throughout the studio. We can’t wait to see where the children take them next.

08/18/2026

Thanks for the shout out University of North Texas!

What happens when 3 alumni from UNT's College of Education combine their passion for learning, creativity and community?

Third Bend Studio, founded by Maggie Harvey, Seda Turk and Decota Johnson, is creating a space where children can explore their creativity and curiosity through art, play and hands-on learning.

Opening in September, Third Bend will offer preschool and afterschool programs for children ages 3 and up as well as a family art and making studio.

Read how these Mean Green educators are turning what they learned at UNT into a new kind of space for Denton families: https://northtex.as/3SL6RBP

08/15/2026

We have huge exciting news..

Third Bend Studio is partnering with Denton’s own Nature's Plate to provide our children with morning and afternoon snacks!

Nature’s Plate creates delicious, plant-based food with an emphasis on whole foods, thoughtful ingredients, and options for a variety of dietary needs. We love that the food we’ll be sharing with children comes from people right here in our community who care deeply about what they make. We also love how this will allow us to minimize our waste by not using single use plastic snack packaging.

And somehow, their generosity didn’t stop at snacks.

As we worked to get Third Bend ready to open, Nature’s Plate donated a refrigerator, food-prep counter, storage shelving, and lots of tiny helpful things to our studio. These are huge, tangible gifts that helped us build the food space our children will use every single day. We are incredibly grateful to have a local business believe in what we’re building and show up for us in such a generous way.

If you haven’t checked out Nature’s Plate yet, please do! They offer an incredible rotating selection of plant-based meals, breakfasts, baked treats, desserts, and more for pickup and delivery. Supporting them means supporting a business that is also actively investing back into the Denton community!

If you’re another childcare program interested in working with Nature’s Plate as a snack provider, reach out to us! We would be so happy to share more about what we’re doing and help connect other programs with them.

It really does take a community to build something like Third Bend. Thank you, Nature’s Plate, for feeding our kids, filling our kitchen, and being part of ours.

08/15/2026

A new little world is waiting to be explored at Third Bend Studio!

We added this big beautiful dollhouse to our Small World area, and we can already imagine all the stories, families, adventures, rearranging, and tiny details that will fill it.

Even more exciting: our very first preschool class starts Monday. We can hardly believe it’s finally time.

The dollhouse is ready. The studio is ready. We are so ready!