180 Days @ NHS: August 2014

During the 2013 - 2014 school year, I attempted to keep up with my 180 blog. I created it as a tab on my original blog and quickly realized that wasn't really how I wanted it set up. I was too far into the year to change it, so I am changing it now. Since I didn't want to lose all the fun things from that year, I just moved it to it's own post... Enjoy!

Day -1: Junior Class Sponsor duties. Makin it rain. $$

Day 0: Junior Class washed a semi...well, the bottom of it. :)

Day 1: We played 2 Truths and a Lie. Here are some of the funnies. "I don't like people." was a truth. haha

Day 2: Conways Rational Tangles. Most fun ever. We practiced adding fractions.

Day 3: Organized our notebooks today! I'm all in this year! #INBjamboree

Day 4: Team Building day in my block class. Straw tower had to
hold a tennis ball. They all worked at least for a little while! I was so impressed!

Day 5: The student I mentor on the football team wrote me the sweetest and
most heartfelt note I have ever received from a student. I cry every time I read it.

Day 6: This used to be a matching assignment in WKST form. I rearranged it and made it a card sort where the kids cut and pasted the steps that go together. More powerful than the WKST, but took a long time. Next time: Cutting out some of the problems and being more specific on how they show their work.

Day 7: I still need practice on formatting pages to fit in a composition book.

Day 8: White boards...lots of teaching was happening. Love it!

Day 9: My children come back to annoy me and leave happiness on my board. Side note: the red is in fact boy handwriting and it's 5-ever because it's longer than 4-ever. <3

Day 10: My Do Now assignment from the beginning of my Geometry class today. Notice/Wonder worked like MAGIC! Kids who don't write anything had opinions. It was beautiful. (Picture was taken from http://mrhonner.com/archives/7055)

Day 11: The pretty colorful notes made me happy as I was grading their notebooks.

Day 12: Trying to come up with ways to help them remember functional relationships. So far it seems to be helping.

Day 13: Decided to rearrange my room a third time since school started. LOVE my groups of 5. So much more teaching/learning is happening. Bonus: it's easier to get around my room.

Day 14: Work BFF, @chelseadeutsch, on Mismatch Day!

Day 15: First day of Geometry = lots of vocabulary and drawings.

Day 16: Pretty sure they thought I was a creeper trying to take their picture, but I loved the teaching that was happening.

Day 17: Joined the poster sensation. These kids did exactly what I asked and had a beautiful story to go along with their equation. Almost cried, I was so excited.

Day 18: Class Sponsor + Powder Puff + Mentor + Homecoming Prep + Busy life in general = DISASTER

Day 19: Homecoming! This kid drives me insane while still being the highlight of my day. #mentorlife

Day 20: Skipped school to come home from Alumni Band Weekend and we flew over Jones Stadium. I love Texas Tech!

Day 21: Teaching domain and range using inequalities and interval notation, so the kids are more ready for Algebra II.

Day 22: This group in 3rd period is even more OCD than I am. Clearly 5th period didn't care about the note.

Day 23: Finally got the posters hung.

Day 24: After teaching Segment Addition and Midpoint/Segment Bisector for a week and having kids still look at me like I am speaking Russian, I decided chocolate might help them visualize. Next year, I start teaching it with chocolate. Worked like magic.

Day 25: My Around the Room activity spelled "Ms H is the best". When the first group got it and yelled it out, I said aw thanks guys. They didn't think it was as funny as I did...figures.

Day 26: Over the weekend, I went to Half Price Books and found the first two books from Euclid's The Elements and a couple others. The kids were excited...to be in a picture with nerdy math books. Win?

Day 27: First time I let education students teach my class. Dancing was part of the lesson. SO fun!

Day 28: Second day of letting other people teach my class. I didn't think it would be hard to hand over my classroom, but it definitely is!

Day 29: Texans Cheerleaders came to our pep rally!

Day 30: Making scatter plots using our fast fact data. Two birds. One stone.

Day 31: The thing this week was creating hashtags for my class, so when they Insta something they know what hashtags to include. #MsHsclass

Day 32: My whiteboards are dying a slow death. Solution: use the desktops. They like it better anyway.

Day 33: Helped a kid who does NOTHING and by the end of class the kid was teaching his table. Didn't get my phone fast enough to take a pic. :(

Day 34: So I have these stickers left over from high school. We call them "white girl" stickers. When they got all their graphs right, they earned one. They have never worked harder. Hilarious. Bonus: we listened to Disney music all morning.

Day 35: Card Matching for Parallel and Perpendicular lines. Blue is parallel, and green is perpendicular.

Day 36: We took the PSAT and PLAN, so I only saw one class. They came in and said, " PLEASE DON'T MAKE US READ OR WRITE OR DO MATH!?" so we made stained glass windows with linear equations.

Day 37: Data collection for scatter plots via fast facts of addition, subtraction, and multiplication. All kids working and excited about practicing mental math.

Day 38: Grading notebooks. I love finding gems. Also...another example of white girl stickers. :)

Day 39: Kids putting their scatterplot data in @Desmos and graphing the line of regression.

Day 40: I split up a table that completely understood linear equations to go teach the other tables that were struggling.

Day 41: Dance, Dance, Transversal + 90s jams = super fun day
Thanks @algebraniac1!

Day 43: Practicing writing and graphing parallel and perpendicular lines

Day 44: Solving systems by graphing

Day 45: Solving systems by substitution foldable.

Day 46: He was the first kid to finish his substitution chain, and he showed ALL his work. I have been so proud of this kid, so i made him pose. haha

Day 47: Practicing solving systems by elimination, and this kid was expressing his feelings about math. Even if he feels this way, I am so proud of his improvement since August!

Day 48: Movie Night at NHS was a SUCCESS! :) So much fun!

Day 49: Trying to finally understand solving systems of equations

Day 50: Scariest mascot I've ever seen

Day 51: Shout out to Desmos and Mr. Stadel's Stacking Cup Activity. We worked through creating the table and equation for each stack of cups and used Desmos to graph and think about some deeper questions. So fun!

Day 52: Thank you children for entertaining me while I grade.

Day 53: Skipped school for wedding #9478579342 but it meant I got to run in cooler weather in the country.

Day 54: End of the six weeks = new A student awards

Day 55: My mentee runs into my classroom BEAMING that he got into college.

Day 56: Kid who does nothing earns four stickers in one day.

Day 57: Unintentionally made a giant test, so I let them use their notebooks.

Day 58: "Miss, can I lay on the floor?" "Sure, as long as you're working."

Day 59: MORE STICKERS!

Day 61: I made the children listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Don't care.

Day 62: My freshmen in advisory like to draw.

Day 63: Sometimes encouragement is needed.

Day 64: Skipped school to run in the snow and take my own tour of Notre Dame

Day 65: Extended Thanksgiving break for sweet Grandma time.

Day 70: oh kids...maybe study next time?

Day 74: The Winter Extravaganza...probably my favorite event at Northbrook.
Christmas + lots of music + seeing my kids perform = magic

Day 75: Juniors highjacked my car while we were waiting for parents.

Day 78: Teaching Spanish speakers/careless teens = hilarity as I grade finals

Day 79: Work bud got me the GREATEST gift EVER. It deserved a selfie. :)

Junior Class Party: I love these little friends SO much!

Junior Class Party:
Me: *skates backwards*
Kid: Miss, let me show you how it's done.
Me: Ok.
Kid: *quickly skates ahead, turns around to skate backwards, feet come out from under him*
Me: Yes, that's how it's done. *laughing hysterically, snaps a picture*

Day 81: First day back = Geometry Taboo! Thanks Tina! They started slow, but got better as class time passed.

Day 82: Kids worked through some triangle sum theorem activities on the iPad. It was nice because they got to work at their own pace. It was bad because it was chaotic, and I never handle that well. Good practice for me.

Day 83: We did a Triangle Hunt around the school. Loved this one.

Day 83+: My freshmen advisory is special.

Day 84: I love how different kids think about things.

Day 85: Even reluctant kids are using the interactive notebooks!

Day 86: Triangle congruence matching cards.

Day 87: First time I used this, and I got some great information from the kids.

Day 88: Shout-out to Lisa and her 180 blog. And the kids still love saying bad words in class. #teacherprobs

Day 89: Still have no idea how to do this on the calculator.

Day 90: We watched YouTube videos in groups of 2 to learn more about triangles. I was able to move around the room to ask/answer questions as they were learning.

Day 91: Kids finding perpendicular bisectors...lots of work and not quitting! #success

Day 92: Triangle vocabulary!

Day 93: SNOW DAY! well...Houston freak out about cold weather day

Day 95: Another SNOW DAY. I mean...the day that my car had a little bit of ice for an hour.

Day 96: Triangle Inequality Theorem

Day 97: The woes of teaching Geometry. It's not even right.

Day 98: After watching kids take a test for 6 hours, I got to write up 11 kids. Not my most favorite day.

Day 99: Ms. H, can I count the squares?

Day 100: My intro to factoring. Fun and not so scary.

Day 101: Used Dan Meyer's Taco Cart to apply Pythagorean Theorem.

Day 102: Decided to start with the more challenging factoring problems. Worked like magic and they handled it so well. Bonus: the easy ones are EXTRA easy. :)

Day 103: The hunt for our #PROM2015 location. #Jumpingpicfail :) Love these children SO much.

Day 104: Star Wars white boards. YES! This is a thing.

Day 105: I was tired of explaining factoring and half the class still didn't understand. They taught each other. It was beautiful.

Day 106: Angry Birds Project and I made some fun with Desmos to go with it.

Day 107: The Flower Sweat Shop #sponsorlife #classof2015 #makinitrain

Day 108: More children hiding under tables. He was working, but decided it would be funnier to pose. I agreed. :)

Day 110: Students had a writing prompt about quadratic functions, so we took some reminder notes first.

Day 111: Making good use of Star Wars white boards. Sharing #nerdlife with my kids.

Day 112: Kid was complaining, so he earned the name DIVA and I gave him a name tag.

Day 112 Part 2: Evil Yoda on left and Elvis Yoda on the right.

Day 112 Part 3: Freshmen advisory made lists of common Freshmen mistakes. "Be pregnated, eat glue, send nudes" just to name a few...

Day 113: Geometry problem: Ratios of side lengths of a quadrilateral are 2:3:5:7 and the perimeter is 84 ft. On the fly, I used straws to represent the x distance. Kids got the concept right away, and in years past kids haven't understood this concept at all. #winning

Day 114: Students explored exponential growth and decay with m&ms. Yum!

Day 116: We did the Penny Circle Activity from Dan Meyer and Desmos! It was magical.

Day 117: 27 million men, women, and children around the world are living in slavery, so February 27th was Shine a Light on Slavery day. I had a red X on my hand, and my kids wanted to join the #enditmovement too.

Day 118: Miss, do you like corn paletas? IDK, but I'm willing to try it. Bad idea...those things are GROSS!

Day 119: Instead of doing the dilations, he turned T Swift into Captain Jack Sparrow.

Day 120: Desk Art.

Day 121: "It turns into BLOG!!"

Day 122: Loved this poster.

Day 123: All the boys soccer teams won and our class president scored his first goal ever! #proudmama

Day 128: The juniors hosted movie night, but I was on a plane to Africa. I love their snapchats!

Day 129: Shared my heart with my kids while I talked about my trip to Rwanda. This is one of my favorite pictures.

Day 130: Trying to teach the children about composite area and the only way it made sense was to cut my paper into pieces. Whatever it takes.

Day 131: Played a game where each group has a certain number of marbles, and as they get questions right they can steal a marble from another team. Each slip of paper is a marble moved. They loved it and worked the whole time.

Day 132: Group who fights me EVERY DAY but the marble game made this happen. #happyteacher

Day 133: Dance Demonstration! The dance classes performed for everyone. Got to see so many kids perform, and most of them have never done anything like that.

Day 134: White board practice, but what i noticed was EVERY kid in my block class had drawn the picture and labeled. Cool to see how far they've come since August.

Day 135: Kids helping me make sure my activity was going to work for the following day turned into nerf gun war. I had no gun. :)

Day 136: I put a dart board picture on the ActivBoard, and we shot nerf darts at it to introduce geometric probability.

Day 137: The day we measure things from Ms. H's house and find the surface area and volume. Disney and thin mints are normal.

Day 138: We started STAAR Olympics today! The opening ceremonies had them create flags and decorations for my room. 4 weeks until they retake the state test for a 3rd or 4th time. Hopefully this is the encouragement and motivation they need!

Day 139: First day of STAAR Olympics Training - Linear Equations

Day 140: Winning

Day 141: Kids used scale factor to find the distance of another object in their photo.

Day 142: STAAR Olympics Store! Best incentives I've ever used. Totally worth the money spent.

Day 143: Senior Dress Up Day!

Day 144: Lots of teaching from kids who don't normally do the teaching. Fun stuff.

Day 145: Did Dan Meyer's Taco Cart again with the other class. The question was where would the cart need to be for both guys to get there at the same time. Two intuitive groups put it at the right angle. Super impressed!

Day 146: Used Mathalicious' Viewmongus and in the other classes we worked it using (16x)^2 + (9x)^2 = diagonal^2, but this class wanted to use proportions. Love the way different kids think about the same problem!