In 1818 he started a carpentry apprenticeship in Warmbrunn, which he dropped after half a year in order to take up his desired profession to become a teacher.
He later became an auxiliary teacher in Gießmannsdorf and, in 1827, he moved to the Evangelical Municipal School in Hirschberg.
The Pädagogische Hochschule in Dresden and high schools in Magdeburg and Leipzig bear his name.
From 1862 onwards his Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon was created which, with over 250,000 entries, is the largest collection of proverbs to date (according to Killy Literaturlexikon).
For numerous German proverbs, Wander gives their equivalents in many foreign languages.