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About Discovery of the World
The learning area, Discovery of the World, helps children make sense of their immediate surroundings, community and the world around them.
Last updated 29 May 2025
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Discovery of the World (DOW)
As an early childhood educator, you can encourage children to explore all aspects of their environment.You play an important role in creating and facilitating learning experiences that:
What are the benefits?
Discovery of the World nurtures children’s natural curiosity for their surroundings, community and the world. It has many benefits including:
Ignites Curiosity and the Joy of Discovery: By encouraging exploration of their environment, children learn about the world they live in. This fosters a sense of wonder and joy in learning, encourages them to explore, make new discoveries and become confident and self-motivated learners.
Develops Essential Process Skills: Process skills are crucial to foster children’s critical and analytical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving abilities. This lays the foundation for future learning and knowledge building in areas such as science, geography, and history.
Promotes Responsibility and Respect: Children develop a sense of responsibility and respect for the environment, people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and settings. They learn to care for themselves, others and the environment, which lays the foundation for teaching them about sustainability.
Learning goals and knowledge, skills and dispositions (KSDs) in DOW
Refer to the Educators’ Guide for Discovery of the World for more information.
Learning Goal 1: Show curiosity and interest in the world they live in
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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1.1 Develop an awareness of their immediate environment (e.g., people, animals, plants, places, events) |
Learning Goal 2: Use essential process skills to make sense of the world around them
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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2.1 Develop skills to gather information about the world around them |
Learning Goal 3: Develop a sense of responsibility, care and respect for the world around them
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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3.1 Develop an awareness of the importance of showing care and respect for people from different backgrounds, cultures and settings |
How can you do it?
Organising the learning environment
The learning environment can be intentionally created to promote inquiry and discovery. You should consider the physical, interactional and temporal aspects of the environment.
Monitoring and assessing children's learning and development
You can gain valuable insights about how children are learning and making sense of the world around them through their everyday experiences. You can do so by:
Staying near to and observing the children during their exploration and investigation, including what they are looking at, talking about and choosing to do
Making records and documentations of children’s conversations/actions using anecdotal notes, photographs and videos
Collecting and analysing samples of their drawings and constructions
This allows you to monitor and assess children’s progress and make informed revisions to subsequent learning experiences. Here are some questions to consider when observing the children with respect to the three learning goals for Discovery of the World.
Resources
Explore printables for Discovery of the World in the resource page.