Third Graders at West Burlington Elementary School had a special visitor Thursday morning.
Ryan Wise, the Director of The Iowa Department of Education, toured the West Burlington elementary building and sat in on a few of the third grade classes.
Wise has been visiting schools throughout Iowa to stay connected with what school districts are doing and how they are doing.
School superintendent David Schmitt and District Trainer Becky Ahern highlighted for Wise the elementary literacy and math programs. The literacy model is going on its third year, the math program is in its first year.
Ahern says that the transition to the new literacy and math models is worth the effort of implementing it into the curriculum because it is a more encompassing approach to learning.
“With these models, it’s helping make it a little more real life, where they are going to transfer that out into the world when they graduate.” Ahern said, “So, those are two huge benefits to these programs that just thinking about their learning and talking their learning and defending it. They are telling you why this is the answer, how they got to it, the conclusion. And then you see that those connection and that transfer being made to other subjects.”
The third graders from last school year achieved a much higher average on the reading proficiency test than the state average.
