Business & CTE in South Dakota Around SD ELA and Math Assessments

Quick answer: Plan for a shorter week, not just a testing window. The SD ELA and Math Assessments cover grades three through eight, the SD Science Assessment sits alongside them, and eleventh graders now take the SD-ACT instead of the old state summative. In a district on a four-day calendar, one testing morning removes a quarter of the week.

What did the switch to the SD-ACT change for my juniors?

South Dakota replaced its eleventh-grade state summative with the SD-ACT from the 2025-26 school year, with the aim of cutting duplicate testing. For a business and career-readiness teacher the practical effect is simple: your juniors now sit a college-entrance test on a school day, and the result follows them into applications rather than only into a state report. Career conversations in your classroom suddenly carry more weight.

Use that. A goal-setting lesson lands differently in the weeks around a test that appears on a transcript, and it fills a period without needing yesterday's content. SMART Financial Goals Lesson: Turn Money Wishes Into Real Plans turns vague money wishes into written, dated targets, which is a single sitting of work and a page you can collect. Students who miss it can do it the following Monday with nothing explained twice.

How do I plan around a four-day week and a testing window at once?

Four-day calendars are common across rural South Dakota, and they change the arithmetic. A course meeting four days a week has sixteen contact periods in a month; lose two mornings to the SD ELA and Math Assessments and you have lost more than a tenth of the term's teaching, not a rounding error. Build units in blocks of four lessons so a missing day removes a lesson, not a sequence.

Keep the four lessons independent enough to reorder. Something that reads as a coherent sequence to you can usually be shuffled without harm, as long as each lesson has its own question and its own product. That is what makes a unit survive a testing calendar published late and revised twice. Print all four at once.

What business content works in a broken week?

Employment and workplace rights are good candidates, because each lesson can stand as a debate with a written outcome. Collective Agreements and Codetermination supplies the material for one of those debates, giving students a comparison to argue with: how workers gain a formal say in one system, and how that sits against what they see in a South Dakota workplace. One period, one position paper, one grade.

Mark it against the South Dakota Content Standards for your course rather than against anything the state test measures, since the two are doing different jobs. Three criteria are plenty. More material filed by grade for this state sits on South Dakota Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12), which is the fastest way to find a replacement lesson at seven in the morning.

What does a whole year look like if I plan it this way?

Long projects go in the two clear stretches: September to late November, and the weeks after the spring window closes. Testing months get the standalone material. This is not a compromise so much as an admission that a four-day week with assessment days in it was never going to carry a twelve-lesson unit without breaking it somewhere.

Nutrition, Health & Food Industry Bundle | High School Biology, Health Science & Business Teaching Resources fills the long stretches with food, health and industry material that runs for a term and works across business, science and health rooms, which matters in a small school where one teacher covers several of them. Regional collections for neighboring states sit on the Great Plains Teaching Resources (IA, KS, NE, ND, SD) if you swap plans with teachers across the line. Both beat rebuilding the same unit every August.

Frequently asked questions

Are these connected to the South Dakota Department of Education?

No. They are independent teaching resources, not affiliated with or endorsed by the South Dakota Department of Education, the state assessments or any exam authority. Matching a task to the South Dakota Content Standards for your course is a judgment you make, and the wording of that link is worth writing on the task sheet.

Do they prepare students for the SD-ACT?

They are not test preparation and do not claim to be. What a business course can do is teach the reading, writing and reasoning that any assessment draws on, and give students a reason to care about what happens after graduation. Use practice material from the test provider for the test itself.

Will these work in a combined or multi-grade section?

Usually, with the written response doing the differentiating rather than the task. Check the grade band and previews on each listing before buying, since everything is an instant digital download. For anything to do with an order, see the store's refund policy.

Related reading

• Mapping Business & CTE Units to the Content Standards in South Dakota
• South Dakota: Teaching Business & CTE in a Multi-Grade Classroom
• South Dakota Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)