Wonderwood Curriculum for Building Knowledge

Curriculum Overview

Outlines the structure, goals, and key features, providing a summary of Wonderwood educational philosophy.

Week 1: Maps

Introduces essential learning habits as children explore maps, their surroundings, and creative ways to build knowledge.

Week 2: Communities

Children will explore the concept of communities, building on last week’s map activities by asking who we live with and near.

Week 3: Food

Last week we explored what people need to thrive in communities. This week we are turning our
attention to food, a basic need that also brings people together and ties these two topics
together.

Week 4: Countries

Last week, we explored how food powers us and connects us. This week, we zoom out to learn more about the world around us—its many different countries, cultures, and ways of life. Even though people may live in different places, eat different foods, or speak different languages, we are all human and we all have things in common.

Week 5: Travel

Last week, we explored how people live in different countries around the world. This week, we’re focused on why we travel. Children will consider why people travel, what skills and knowledge are needed to make travel possible, and what they gain from it. We will explore how we travel in more depth when we discuss Transit in Week 7!

Week 6: Energy

Last week, we explored travel: where we go, why we go, what we need to do to make it happen, and how it connects us to the world. This week we’re digging deeper energy, which makes all that travel possible. From food that fuels our bodies to sunlight, batteries, wind, gasoline, and engines, energy makes motion happen!

Week 7: Transit

Last week we explored energy and engines and what makes things go. This week, we are shifting to how people move: how they travel near and far, and how transit has changed over time. From walking to wheels to high-speed trains and space flight, we'll investigate the history of human movement and the human inventions that help us go farther, faster!

Week 8: Construction

Last week, we explored transit. This week, we will look at the structures, systems, and inventions that make this movement and much of modern life possible. From bridges to building to roads and tunnels, we’ll ask: How do we build the things we rely on every day?

Week 9: Machines

Last week, we explored construction and the systems people design to support modern life. This week, we shift our focus to machines that help us build, move, and lift with greater power and efficiency.

Week 10: Technology

Last week, we explored machines and how they help us use energy to do work more efficiently.
This week, we shift from mechanical power to electrical control to discover how technology
allows machines to respond, sense, and act automatically. We are using the word “technology” here to refer to “electronics technology.” We’ll cover other forms of technology in Week 12:
Inventions.

Week 11: Coding

Last week, we explored how technology uses circuits, sensors, and signals to control machines and systems. This week, we’ll look at the language or code behind that control and how it lets people tell computers what to do!

Week 12: Inventions

Over the past few weeks, children explored how machines help us use energy to do work, how
technology allows machines to sense and respond, and how coding and AI help people teach computers to think and learn.
This week, we’ll bring those ideas together to study inventions and the design and creativity
necessary to use what we already know to generate new ideas to solve problems

Week 13: Forces

Children have explored how energy powers systems, how machines use that energy to do work, how technology and coding help us control and automate those systems, and how inventions combine all these ideas to solve problems. This week, we’ll explore the invisible rules that explain how things work: forces.

Week 14: Space

Last week, children explored the invisible forces like gravity, friction, and magnetism that shape life on Earth. This week, we’ll take those same ideas beyond our planet to see how things work in space, when they’re no longer on Earth.

Week 15: Weather

When we studied space, children explored how the Sun shapes our solar system and keeps Earth and the other planets moving in balance. Now they’ll bring that learning back to Earth to learn how energy from the Sun affects how temperature, air pressure, moisture, and wind interact in different ways in Earth’s atmosphere to create weather.

Week 16: Explorers

This week, children will discover how people use knowledge of natural patterns such as the
weather, the wind, stars, currents, and skies to explore the wider world.

Children will learn that explorers were careful observers who combined curiosity with tools and technology to find their way. They’ll study how navigation depends on understanding
geography, wind, and weather; experiment with simple mapping and direction-finding; and
reflect on how discovery has always been powered by wonder and knowledge.

Week 17: Forests

Coming next week…