Weekly plans
— week‑by‑week story themes, recommendations, and activity suggestions.
Projects
— longer explorations aligned to weekly learning.
Resources
— the resource bank used by plans and projects.
Note for educators
This month's exploration prioritizes hands-on discovery over explanation. Kids will build catapults, crash marbles, and create rockets—feeling forces at work before naming them.
Critical Thinking & Reasoning emerge naturally as kids ask why one car travels farther or what makes rockets fly higher. Through repeated experiments, they discover patterns: harder pushes create bigger movements; every action triggers a reaction; forces can be visible or invisible. These observations build scientific thinking without formal instruction.
Design Thinking drives the learning. Kids modify conditions—testing surfaces, adjusting angles, changing forces—to make things move faster, slower, or farther. This iterative process of test‑observe‑refine develops engineering mindsets.
Pattern Recognition connects science to storytelling. Just as forces create predictable movements, story events trigger consequences. Children trace cause‑and‑effect chains in conversations and plot progressions.
The approach is deliberately experience‑first: make, then explain. Build, then analyze. Feel the push and pull of forces before learning Newton's Laws. This sequence ensures understanding runs deeper than vocabulary.
Cross‑curricular Integration happens organically. Movement appears everywhere—in physical forces, narrative arcs, conversation flows, even the slow growth of plants. The theme naturally weaves science, literacy, and creative expression into coherent learning.
BIG PICTURE IDEAS AND RELATED CONCEPTS
Core Understanding: Energy is power that creates movement when released through forces
Science Dimension:
Energy exists in many forms (mechanical, electrical, magnetic, chemical, thermal)
Energy transfers between objects through forces
Energy never disappears, only transforms
More energy creates more movement
Forces are pushes and pulls that transfer energy
Nature moves in response to energy as well. The movement is slow, cyclic and gradual.
Nature gets energy to grow (a type of slow movement) from the sun
Different energy types create different movements at different speeds (energy from sun makes trees grow slowly, while a push from a bat makes the ball move fast)
Invisible forces (electricity, magnetism, thermal energy) can still create visible effects
Overall takeaway for the week: EXPLORE how different energy types create different movements at different speeds through hands-on experiments.
Language Arts Dimension:
There is energy within us that makes us move towards our hopes, dreams, and desires. Our passions and interests are a form of energy that moves us forward in life.
Ideas gain energy when nurtured and developed.
Related learning activities:
PLAY exquisite corpse sentence games and BUILD crooked circular narratives as each child adds to the previous word
READ circular narratives in fiction and nonfiction and EXPLORE how stories return to their starting point; MAP circular plots and TRACE changes
STUDY stories about real people's passions and DISCOVER how energy moves them toward goals
EXPLORE circular poetry that begins and ends with the same sentence
Circular stories and narratives “Just like any object that returns to its natural state after the effect of a force fades, sometimes writers write stories to show characters return to their initial place ... or sometimes initiate a new chain of similar events ...”