Where Learning Comes to Life
At Oakbrook, Igniting Minds means stoking curiosity, equipping students to think deeply, and ultimately teaching them how to learn. It means creating opportunities for students to move beyond memorizing information to exploring ideas, making connections, asking questions, and applying what they know.
And sometimes, that looks like fairy-tale characters filling a Kindergarten classroom. Other times, it looks like giant neurons drawn in chalk across an Upper School sidewalk.
Building a Love of Learning from the Beginning
For our Kindergarten students, Fairy Tale Day is much more than an opportunity to dress as a favorite character. It is the culmination of a unit designed to introduce students to classic fairy tales while developing foundational literacy skills and cultivating a love of reading and storytelling.
As students explore familiar stories, they learn to recognize characters and settings, sequence events, identify problems and solutions, build vocabulary, and understand how stories are constructed. They aren’t simply listening to a story—they are learning how to think about what they read.
Fairy Tale Day brings that learning to life. Students step into the stories they have studied, celebrate alongside their classmates, and experience the joy and imagination that books can inspire.
These early experiences help establish something we hope will follow students throughout their years at Oakbrook: curiosity and excitement about learning.
Taking Learning Beyond the Textbook
Years later, that same philosophy can be seen in an AP Psychology class.
While studying the nervous system, AP Psychology students took their lesson outside, using sidewalk chalk to create large-scale drawings of neurons. Students drew and labeled the different structures while exploring how neurons function and communicate within the human body.
Drawing a neuron requires something different from simply memorizing its parts for a test. Students must visualize the concept, understand how the pieces relate, recreate what they have learned, explain it, and collaborate with one another along the way.
And because their classroom became the sidewalk, their learning became part of the larger Oakbrook community. Their colorful creations were shared not only with their classmates but with everyone who walked by.
Learning How to Learn
These two experiences may seem worlds apart—fairy tales and neuroscience, Kindergarten and AP Psychology—but they illustrate the same important part of the Oakbrook Way.
We want students to be active participants in their education.
Small classes allow teachers to know their students, encourage deeper discussion, ask meaningful questions, and create opportunities for students to explore ideas rather than simply receive information. As students grow, those opportunities become increasingly sophisticated—from hands-on classroom experiences and interdisciplinary projects to the arts, electives, AP coursework, and college-level learning.
Throughout it all, students are challenged to think critically while learning to view knowledge and the world around them through the lens of biblical wisdom.
“As an Admissions Director, one of the things I love most is showing families that the Oakbrook Way isn’t simply something we say—it is something you can see happening across our campus. From a Kindergartener discovering the wonder of a great story to an AP student exploring neuroscience on the sidewalk, we want students asking questions, making connections, and becoming excited about learning. We aren’t preparing them just for the next test or the next grade. We are helping them learn how to learn.”
— Amanda Ledbetter, Director of Advancement & Admissions
Ultimately, Igniting Minds is about developing students who are intellectually curious, capable of critical thinking, collaborative, creative, and increasingly self-directed—students prepared to carry those habits into college, their careers, and wherever God calls them to lead and serve.
Because at Oakbrook, some of the most meaningful learning happens when a lesson becomes an experience—and curiosity takes it from there.
Experience the Oakbrook Way in person — see how hands-on learning sparks curiosity, builds confidence, and brings learning to life at every age.
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