The Pods

Language Arts

Wildwood’s Pod experience offers a stimulating print-rich environment through which children learn to appreciate the significance of language in their everyday lives. In the Pods, teachers offer students many opportunities to interact with text and to “think about reading.” Students move from sequential decoding and vocabulary building to becoming fluent readers who enjoy many different forms of written texts. Students develop skills—they are able to sound out regular words, know many sight words, and have good reading-comprehension skills. But more importantly, they enjoy reading for pleasure as well as for purpose.

Wildwood teachers offer an appropriate balance of phonics and meaningful texts in the teaching of reading and writing. In the Pods, students are immersed in a language program that is designed to enhance their phonemic awareness (the conscious awareness of sounds in spoken words). Emphasis is placed on helping children learn to develop automatic recognition of words through direct interaction with literature. Phonics instruction is offered as it is deemed appropriate for individual learners, because we recognize that students enter school with different levels of phonemic awareness. The flexible structure of the K-2 Pods allows teachers to tailor instruction to meet the needs of small groups of learners.

Social Studies

Three social studies themes—habitats, oceans, and the world of work—rotate each year over a three-year period in the Pods. Field trips and guest speakers related to the social studies themes give children firsthand experiences, bringing their studies to life. Hands-on activities such as block building, which is usually related to a field trip that a Pod class has been on, further enrich children’s learning. Books that reflect the social studies themes are used individually and in small-group literary circles that culminate in children sharing what they have read with their classmates using skits, or by creating posters, diagrams, or mobiles. Pod children receive a strong foundation in how to research by doing theme-based projects. For example, for the habitats theme, Pod students choose an animal and research its habitat using primary sources. Their research culminates in an interactive project—perhaps a small “museum” that shows the animal in its habitat or a computer presentation using HyperStudio software.

Mathematics

In the Pods, children learn that math is everywhere. They learn to look for math—numbers, shapes, patterns, etc.—in their world and before long begin to notice math all around them, pointing out their findings with unbelievable excitement. Children spend time searching for patterns, which is the foundation for all mathematical thinking. Soon they start to count, organize, graph, measure, think about numbers, play with numbers, estimate, calculate, and create and solve problems. They communicate their mathematical thinking in a variety of modalities: verbally in small group discussions, by using manipulatives, or through writing in their math journals.

Pod students begin their mathematical journey with many introductions to new concepts. As they mature and grow, the expectations begin to expand as well. Pod students learn place value and double-digit addition and subtraction, along with regrouping strategies. Most importantly, children leave the Pods with a firm grasp of basic facts and the concept of numbers and how they work.

Science

The goal of the Pod science program is to have children identify themselves as scientists and to see that science is all around them. Learning how to think and act like a scientist is fundamental to the early years of the Wildwood science program. Engaged in activities that are aimed at building scientific skills, children first learn how to make observations using their senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. As the year progresses, children learn how to ask appropriate questions, how to make a hypothesis, how to identify which materials are needed, and finally, how to develop a good scientific plan.

The activities children do in Pod science are hands-on. In addition to supporting topics already discussed in the classroom, themes and questions can range anywhere from how to build an animal habitat to finding out which type of paper towel is the most absorbent.

Children leave the Pods with a strong sense of scientific curiosity and an enthusiasm for scientific discovery.

Spanish

In the Pods, children are introduced to Spanish orally through gesture and mime, songs, poems, rhymes, games, and drama. The children learn vocabulary words that link their activities to their environment and their everyday life, things like nature words, colors, parts of the body, clothing, foods, rooms in the home, numbers, the time, the family, weather and the seasons, days of the week and months of the year. The children form basic oral sentences and learn practical expressions through movement and other creative activities.

Visual Arts

The art program for K-2 takes place in a supportive environment where each child is allowed to work at his or her own level and experience the joy of creative expression. Pod students are encouraged to follow their own impulses and are reminded that everything they do is an important step along the way to their development as artists.

Each Pod rotates through several two-week sessions per year. For each session, a particular theme is established—habitats, say, or animals—and explored in different modes and media. For example, one Pod explored the world of architecture. The children began by studying and drawing the shapes and features of houses in the Wildwood area. After more sketching from architectural models, they created a 3-D version of their dream house using clay and landscaped it with found materials. They ended by arranging all the houses in one big village and having a party.

Art for children of this age is an imaginative exercise, a confidence-building tool, and a way of seeing the world in a different light. The school’s goal is to introduce children to an experience of the visual arts that they will expand upon for the rest of their lives.

Performing Arts

The Pods begin the year with a two-week introduction to the performing arts that combines song, creative movement, and collaborative theatre games. Children do a story-based project using the book The Boll Weevil Ball as a springboard to explore several different disciplines including collaboration. Pod students work in small groups to rehearse and perform scenes from the story while exploring the use of simple props and costumes. They learn three different dances—waltz, lyrical jazz, and an alternative jazz stomp—and spend one session working in pairs creating dialogue for two of the characters in the story.

The next project dovetails with the Pods’ study of habitats, specifically rain forests. The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry, and Jabuti the Tortoise, a Trickster Tale from the Amazon, by Gerald McDermott, are two stories that are used to let students learn about the rainforest while continuing to have fun exploring different aspects of performing arts.

Physical Education

Wildwood’s comprehensive health-related physical education curriculum incorporates many different resources, among them programs developed by San Diego State University and UCSD. The curriculum encourages students to seek out physical activity, develop and maintain acceptable levels of physical fitness, develop a variety of basic movement and manipulative skills, and demonstrate good sportsmanship and cooperative behavior. Children learn basic locomotor skills (walking, running, jumping, hopping, galloping, skipping, and leaping) through enjoyable, creative games and activities. Hand-eye and general coordination, graceful movement, and the ability to handle and manipulate objects are all part of the Pod P.E. program.

Life Skills

Wildwood’s Life Skills program builds an inclusive, respectful, and open culture at the school. Life Skills help students become people who can live and work in a diverse community. The skills are not taught in isolation but are part of the fabric of the school day. The Pod classes focus on interpersonal skills such as respect, caring for others, cooperating, and making friends. A child comforting another child who has been hurt shows caring, while cooperation is demonstrated when one child helps a small group with a math problem. Life Skills may be discussed at morning circle or learned through role-playing activities. Having the opportunity to act out a situation makes it easier for children to apply the skills when a situation really happens.

Service Learning

Wildwood’s Service Learning program gives children the experience of supporting and learning about their school and local community. Each week every Pod student has a job within his or her classroom, such as cleaning up after snack or keeping supplies in order. Additionally, each Pod classroom has specific ways to contribute to the well-being of the school or the local community. One Pod is in charge of the school Lost and Found. Other Pods have made books and gathered books from home to bring to a local children’s clinic waiting room or participated in a pen pal project with students at a local elementary school.