Tag Archives: Hamilton

Wisconsin’s History Teacher of the Year has Strayed from Using Textbooks

history teacherNorthwest Now: Rhonda Watton has progressively gone away from relying on textbooks to teach her social studies students at Templeton Middle School, relying most on primary accounts of history to teach, a method that has earned her the accolade of Wisconsin’s History Teacher of the Year.

Watton has been a teacher for 25 years, beginning in the Milwaukee Public Schools in 1992 and spending the past 20 years in the Hamilton School District.

Her love of history was sparked by college professors at Carthage College in Kenosha.

“They made history come alive for me; it really was interactive classes and they had different ways of presenting the material,” Watton said. “Some of it was through literature, some was through film and plenty of discussion.”

This teaching style struck Watton so much as a student that she made it her own as a teacher.

“The use of primary source documents in the classroom and not just teaching out of a history book, which is someone’s secondary source interpretation of what went on, is important,” Watton said.

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Sussex collaboration develops youth sports complex

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The Hamilton School District unveiled its newest sports complex in May, courtesy of a collaboration between Halquist Stone Co. and the Pewaukee Sussex United Soccer Club that has been in the works since 2013.

Halquist Stone donated $200,000 cash as well as $100,000 worth of supplies to the project, and the Pewaukee Sussex United Soccer Club donated $50,000 in soccer equipment. The club will also make an annual donation to help offset the maintenance costs.

Sussex-based Halquist Stone has been in the same location since it was founded by John Halquist in 1929. The company has no plans to move. Instead, it wants to be able to support the community that helped the firm grow, said president and co-owner Bill Halquist.

Bill and his brother, Tom, who is the vice president, co-own the business and are the fourth generation of the family to own the company.

The 14-acre sports complex is complete with nine soccer fields and two softball fields and held a grand opening in May, when it was named the Halquist Youth Complex. The facility is located just south of Hamilton High School.

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