We've MovED!!
We're excited to have moved to a new school home in the Fall of 2023. We're now located in the beautiful building of the First Baptist Church of Oak Park at 820 Ontario Street and Oak Park Avenue, along the northern edge of Scoville Park in Oak Park, Illinois. For more info, photos, map, and more, click below:
VIrtual Info Session
Join us for a live information session on Zoom where you can explore our programs, hear more about The Children's School, ask questions, and discover the advantages of progressive education. We hold virtual information sessions generally twice each month, normally on Fridays. Our next scheduled sessions are below. Click the date you'd like to register for:
VIrtual Tour
Enjoy this one-minute video, which gives you a flavor of what a day at The Children's School is like. We've also included information and photos below about our classroom design.
If you'd also like to explore an onsite tour, please scroll to the bottom of the page for more information and how to contact us!
Our Classrooms Are Designed to Invite Curiosity and Make it Fun to Learn
We design our classrooms so that students can move freely about, working and playing as independently as possible at their developmental level.
In a typical classroom you will see: work areas of tables and chairs rather than individual desks to foster collaboration and cooperation; a rug or other meeting area where the entire class can come together for discussions, stories, planning sessions, etc.; a play area with blocks, games, and puzzles; a cozy reading area where children can snuggle up with a book, enjoy independent study or a quiet conversation.
Rarely will you see commercially-produced posters or decorations on the walls; instead you will see artifacts of the children’s current learning projects.
Our classrooms are purposefully designed so that they can be easily rearranged to accommodate a large project. At any given point in the year, you may walk into a classroom and find it reconfigured as the International Space Station, or an American town during the Great Depression, or a tropical rainforest. We want the curriculum to live and breathe in our classrooms rather than being constrained by furniture.
Our School Facilities over the Years
Our school was founded in Oak Park by Daniel P. Ryan, Ed.D., where in 2004 we had 13 students in grades K-1 in a two-room space. We moved to St. Mary of Celle campus in Berwyn in 2006, where our school grew and we added a middle school in 2014. In 2018, we returned to Oak Park, and stayed in the former St. Edmund's parish school building until Fall of 2023. Now, we are located in the historic First Baptist Church of Oak Park building at 820 Ontario Street, in oak Park, Illinois. The building is beautiful and spacious, and designed by the renowned architect E. E. Roberts in 1927. Learn more about our history, or enjoy a video describing our early days at TCS.
We ARE offering
on-site tours!
Before visiting, we ask that you first attend a virtual info session. These 50-minute virtual sessions are hosted typically twice a month (see schedule at the top of this page). It provides a brief history of progressive education, key tenets of our educational philosophy, sample student project work, tuition, and our admissions and enrollment processes and timelines.
On-site visits can then be tailored to the grade of your incoming student.
Masks are optional for onsite tours and in our facility. Please reschedule if you are ill or not feeling well.
Have more questions? Submit the contact form on this page.
