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Lynn Miller and Rhonda Nachtigall from the WHS Business Education Department shared plans and details for the upcoming Get R.E.A.L. workshop on April 21.  The acronym stands for Real Education About Life and focuses on preparing students for financial decisions they will likely face after graduation.  These range from housing costs, to education expenses, transportation, retail purchases, the cost of credit, etc.  The workshop is coordinated by Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Nachtigall with the help of area businesses and the Watertown Chamber of Commerce.  It is in its second year and will continue to expand, potentially as part of a financial literacy course that would be added to the curriculum in the future.    

Curriculum Updates 

The Committee reviewed draft plans of reading and language arts curriculum for Riverside Middle School.  The curriculum changes formalize the instructional goals and strategies in reading and writing that our professional development and training have supported over the past several years.  These include efforts to bring about a readers and writers workshop format to classroom instruction.  Staff will continue to review the documents and identify areas that need further detail or clarification prior to implementation.   

New Federal and State Content Standards 

Members of the administration and teaching staff will begin reviewing the first public draft of the Common Core State Standards for English/language arts and mathematics.  This is a federal project in which Wisconsin and 47 other states are participating in to bring about uniform, national content standards to public school classrooms.

Once they are finalized, Wisconsin will review the standards with the likely intent to adopt.  Subsequent efforts will then take place to develop a new state assessment system built on the adopted standards.  Watertown administrators and teachers will also review the new standards with the purpose of aligning instruction to them so that instruction and assessment are matched.  These standards can be reviewed on the Watertown Unified School District’s Curriculum and Instruction webpage.

posted March 23, 2010 « back to Message Center home

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