A Living Laboratory for Science
More Than 80 Animals, an Entire Science Curriculum
At the heart of our Science & Nature Center is an on-campus teaching zoo with more than 80 animals, an outdoor classroom, and a weekly specialist program led by a full-time Animal & Nature Studies teacher.
Children learn science through direct experience with living systems. What begins with curiosity, observation, and animal care grows into ecology, husbandry, genetics, adaptation, natural selection, evolution, and animal cognition.
Developed and refined over years by our Animal & Nature Studies specialist team, the curriculum becomes increasingly sophisticated as children grow. They observe closely, ask questions, gather evidence, interpret data, experiment, and use what they learn to make sense of the natural world.
Our science lab just happens to be a teaching zoo.
The Animals Are Part of the Curriculum
Students observe behavior, care for living things, investigate questions, look for evidence, and use the teaching zoo as a direct window into biology.
The Science & Nature Center expands the classroom outdoors, where movement, observation, hands-on investigation, and direct experience become part of scientific learning.
Our diverse collection includes many rescued and rehomed animals, giving children direct experience with anatomy, behavior, habitats, adaptations, and living systems.
Animal & Nature Studies is part of the regular program, not an occasional visit or after-school activity.
Outdoor learning spaces, a walk-in aviary, reptile room, and purpose-built animal enclosures give children opportunities to observe and safely interact with appropriate animals as part of scientific learning.
The Science Grows With the Child
The experience begins with wonder and care, then grows into increasingly sophisticated biology. As children get older, they move from understanding scientific ideas to using them to investigate increasingly complex systems.
Wonder & Care
Observation, safe interaction, animal needs, habitats, communication, curiosity, empathy, and respect for living things.
Discovering the Animal Kingdom
Animal traits and classification, body language and behavior, adaptations, mammals, reptiles and birds, seasonal changes, plant systems, and veterinary care.
Animal Care 101
Animal husbandry, nutrition, comparative anatomy, habitats, veterinary care, animal identification, native animals, and increasingly responsible hands-on care.
Ecology 101
Predators and prey, food chains, habitats, conservation, plant and animal needs, behavior and communication, pollinators, plant care, and harvesting.
Students move into increasingly authentic work with Barnyard animals, investigating enrichment, training, nutrition, behavior, veterinary medicine, comparative anatomy, animal intelligence, husbandry, and how environments influence animal health and well-being.
Students investigate inheritance and variation through genotype and phenotype, Mendelian inheritance, phenotypic plasticity, adaptation, natural and artificial selection, convergence, fossils, and speciation. Data, models, prediction, and experimentation help them understand how traits are inherited and populations change over time.
Students go deeper into the mechanisms of genetics and evolution, investigating alleles, dominant and recessive traits, Punnett squares, Mendelian inheritance, genotype and phenotype, natural and artificial selection, adaptation, convergence, and speciation. They use models, data, hypotheses, and experimentation to predict outcomes and investigate change across generations.
Students investigate complex ecosystems through field observations, long-term projects, and environmental studies, exploring food webs and energy transfer, biomes, population growth and carrying capacity, migration, native plants, fungi, pollinators, climate change, conservation, keystone species, and human influence.
Evolution, One Generation at a Time
As a capstone experience in the upper grades, students spend the year evolving their own imaginary organisms through generation after generation. New environmental conditions and evolutionary pressures continually change the problem, requiring students to apply what they are learning about inheritance, variation, adaptation, and natural selection.
By year's end, organisms that began from similar starting points can look remarkably different. Students don't simply learn the vocabulary of evolution. They model it, test it, and reason through why their species evolved the way it did.
Follow the Barnyard
Meet the animals and see everyday life inside the WHPS teaching zoo.
Follow @whpschool_barnyardCome See Where Science Comes Alive
Visit WHPS and see how the teaching zoo, nature, and hands-on science are woven into the life of the school.