It’s now been six weeks since the Annual Project WET Coordinator’s Conference in Greenville, South Carolina and we had a great time, along with great food and hospitality in South Carolina. 🙂
I wanted to let you know some updates in the Project WET world that may influence facilitators and workshop participants too—our correlations to the Next Generation Science Standards, our Early Childhood Project WET activity guide, and a new CD of WET songs, produced by our NJ Project WET Coordinator.
I’m the chair of our Standards committee and we are currently in the Review phase of our Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) correlations project. Basically, we conducted a third party review (thanks, Betsy O’Day!) that revealed what WET Coordinators had been suspecting—the NGSS matches on our web portal could use some improvement. The Project WET Foundation office paid three correlators, who are very familiar with Project WET activities, the NGSS and correlating standards, to correlate all Project WET activities. That part of the project is now complete and Review teams of teachers and educators from across the U.S. are now in the final phases of review. The project concludes on October 31, 2016, with an anticipated availability for NGSS correlations on the web portal by the end of 2016/beginning of 2017. I’ll share more as they are available and also will be working on standards correlations to go with our newly adopted Missouri L
earning Standards (April 2016), once the NGSS project concludes.
At the conference in August, our Early Childhood Project WET Activity Guide Draft, called Getting Little Feet WET was unveiled. We enjoyed a speaker, now a professor of science education and former North Carolina WET Coordinator, who explained the difference in working with young children and early learners. As in any good WET workshop, we experienced a couple of the activities and began thinking about how to market and train facilitators to work with Early Childhood educators. This publication is currently in the field test phase and early childhood teachers from Missouri were invited to participate.
Finally, Kevin Kopp, NJ Project WET Coordinator, is a musician who has put together some of his favorite songs that correspond with WET activities, entitled Water We Singing About? His CD and download are now available for purchase, if anyone is interested. I encourage you to take a look and listen at: http://cdbaby.com/cd/kevinkopp.