We know that all learning begins with wonder: When given free rein, curiosity is a magnificent guide to deeper understanding. Therefore, we encourage our students to follow their ideas as far they can and bring their classmates along for the adventure. If that means spending an extra class period on something of particular interest, we’re all for it. There’s plenty of time to teach our students everything they need to know before moving on to the next grade, and learning well is far more important than learning quickly.

There’s a lot to learn about math from music, and our garden has important things to tell us about poetry. Great thinkers are unconstrained by subject-matter boundaries; therefore, our classrooms deliberately communicate and collaborate with one another, and we foster interdisciplinary learning from the earliest ages.

Listening is an important skill and we hone it carefully, but lectures can only take the human mind so far; active discussion, roleplaying, experiment, and teaching others are crucial elements of an engaged and well-rounded learning portfolio. Therefore, our students spend as much time doing as watching.

There’s a reason toddlers learn to walk before they run and babble before they can speak. The brain is wired to learn incrementally, building upon what it knows to learn even more. We similarly offer incremental, developmentally appropriate lessons that build upon one another; in this way, ordinary children achieve extraordinary heights of aptitude and understanding.

Our students don’t have time to waste on anything less than the very best thoughts and ideas that have ever been recorded. They only get one childhood, and we’re determined to fill it with the richest, most lovely and worthwhile education we can. We strongly believe every child deserves to learn directly from the greatest thinkers of all time.

We don’t think error should be cause for concern or anxiety; on the contrary, we believe being wrong is often the quickest path to getting it right. Therefore, we embrace mistakes as happy opportunities for growth, both as individuals and a learning community.

The mind, body, heart, and soul are interconnected and interdependent. Optimal learning requires due regard for attention span, atmosphere, and environment. Therefore, we take learning outside as often as possible. Sometimes that means history class in the garden; sometimes it’s extra recess playing soccer with our pastor. Whatever the occasion, we offer our students ample opportunity to enjoy the many mental and physical benefits of being outdoors.

As we now know from advances in fetal development research, human beings are literally made to learn. We believe God delights in forming each child with an innate and insatiable desire to know and understand. We strive to honor His design, not by fulfilling that instinct but by refining and whetting it. If we’ve done our job as a school, students graduate from OLMC more curious and more passionate about learning than when they came to us.