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

Children will explore how forests are living communities made up of countless plants, animals, and organisms that depend on one another to survive. They’ll discover that a forest is more than trees—it’s an entire ecosystem where sunlight, water, soil, and living things work together to create balance and life.

Week 18: Plants

This week children will explore how plants are the energy engines of Earth. They will learn how
plants capture sunlight, transform it into food through photosynthesis, and support ecosystems by providing oxygen, shelter, and nourishment.

Week 19: Light

Children explored how plants depend on sunlight to grow, change, and reproduce last week. This week, they’ll take a step back to investigate light itself as a form of energy that moves through space and interacts with the world.

Week 20: Colors

Previously children explored light as a form of energy that moves through space and shapes
what we see. This week, they build on that understanding to explore color: how it appears, where it shows up in the world, and why it matters.
Children will learn that color is created when light interacts with objects and is reflected into our eyes. They will explore how living things use color for warning, attraction, camouflage, and communication and how humans use color in art, maps, symbols, and design to organize
information and express meaning.

Week 21: Pollination

In previous weeks, children explored forests as living systems, plants as energy engines, light as a source of energy and sight, and color as a tool for communication and survival. This week,
children bring all of that knowledge together to explore pollinators and the powerful
relationships that sustain life on Earth.
Children will learn that pollinators, such as bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other animals, play
a critical role in helping plants live. They will explore how plants and pollinators depend on one another, how color, scent, and structure help living things connect, and why these relationships matter for ecosystems and for humans

Week 22: Patterns and Cycles

Over the past several weeks, children have explored forests as living systems, plants as energyengines, light and color as forces that shape life, and pollinators as examples of cooperation and interdependence. This week, children step back to notice something deeper and more fundamental: many of these processes repeat in predictable ways.
Children will explore patterns and cycles in the natural world, such as day and night, seasons, life cycles, pollination, migration, and the movement of energy and water. They will begin to see that repetition is not accidental, but essential for balance, renewal, and survival.

Week 23: Oceans

Children will explore oceans as vast, dynamic systems that support life on Earth. They will learn that oceans are not just bodies of water, but layered environments with different light zones, temperatures, pressures, and currents, which shape what can live there and how.
Children will examine the incredible diversity of ocean life and the adaptations organisms use to survive in extreme conditions. They will also explore how oceans drive powerful cycles, including tides, weather, climate, and the water cycle, and how these cycles are influenced by the Moon, gravity, and Earth’s rotation

Week 24: Rocks

In the previous week, children explored oceans as vast systems that impact our life on Earth.
They also store secrets of ancient Earth on the seafloor. This week, children turn their attention
to the ground they walk on to study rocks as records of Earth’s history.

Children will learn that rocks are the result of powerful processes over time. They will investigate the three major rock types: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, and connect each type to the conditions that formed it. Through observation, comparison, and modeling, children will begin to see how heat, pressure, water, wind/weathering, movement, and time transform Earth’s
materials.

Week 25: Fossils

This week children will discover that some rocks contain something even more extraordinary:
evidence of life. Children will learn how fossils form and why fossilization is rare. They will
examine different types of fossils (e.g., bones, imprints, amber, footprints, and preserved
remains) and explore what each type can reveal about past environments and organisms.

Week 26: Ancient Civilizations

Children will explore how early civilizations used careful observation and shared knowledge to
build societies. They will investigate how people learned to farm, build near rivers, develop tools
from stone and metal, trade goods, track seasonal cycles, and record ideas through writing and symbols.

Week 27: Mythological Creatures

Last week, children learned that civilizations grow where knowledge accumulates and this week they will explore another powerful form of knowledge: story.

Across cultures, humans have created myths and mythical creatures to explain natural forces, human emotions, danger, beauty, fear, and hope. Before scientific explanations of storms, seasons, oceans, and earthquakes, stories gave meaning to the unknown. While these stories were not scientifically precise, they did create emotional, symbolic, and cultural truths.

Using their knowledge from previous weeks (e.g., forces, weather, oceans, cycles), children will analyze what myths and mythical creatures reveal about what people know and believe to be true in different cultures. Throughout the week, children will consider how something can feel meaningful and “real” even when it is not physically observable. This prepares children for next week’s exploration of money and value by asking: What makes something valuable?

Week 28: Money

Last week, children considered what makes something feel real even when it isn’t. This week, they turn to another powerful human invention built on shared belief: money.
Children will examine how early civilizations traded goods before money existed. They will
explore how scarcity, specialization, surplus, and distance made trade necessary, and how
money developed as a shared agreement about value and trust.

Week 29: Gemstones

Last week, children explored money as a system humans created to organize trade and assign value to goods. This week, they turn their attention to gemstones.
Children will investigate how gemstones form through powerful processes involving heat,
pressure, and time. They will learn that gemstones are minerals with special properties such as hardness, color, clarity, and rarity. Children will also explore how crystals grow, how gemstones differ from ordinary rocks, and why certain minerals become rare and valuable.

Week 30: Natural Disasters

Last week, children explored how the Earth creates valuable gemstones through heat, pressure, and time. This week, they shift their focus to how those same Earth systems can act suddenly and powerfully, reshaping the land and affecting life.
Children will investigate natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, floods,
and wildfires. They will examine cause and effect, noticing how energy builds and is released across different systems. They will also consider how people respond to natural disasters. They will explore how communities prepare, stay safe, and rebuild. They will begin to see that while natural disasters can be destructive, they are also part of larger natural processes that shape the Earth over time

Week 31: Nature

Coming next week…