This paper presents the extension to geometrical nonlinearities of a variable kine- matics modeling approach for composite plates. Geometrical non-linearities are included by referring to von Kàrmàn’s finite deflection hypothesis and, assuming the strains remain small, a linear elastic material behavior is retained. The Lagrangian description is adopted for writing the plate motion. A Ritz method is employed to solve the resulting two-dimensional differen- tial equations in weak form within a consistent Newton-Raphson algorithm. First preliminary results verify the proposed implementation.