Week 35 was the final full week of regular classes at Manor New Tech HS prior to final exam week in Week 36.  Our students’ days were filled with reviews and project presentations as they wrapped up their classes for this final trimester and prepared for next week’s exams.  We ended this week with a celebration of our school’s talent and un-talent with our Annual School Talent Show and Teacher Lip Sync Battles.

In Ms. Tillson’s and Ms. Thompson’s Integrated US History / ELA 3 class, the students used the Group Sharing protocol on Monday to give each other feedback on their essays.  The students listened to their peers read their essays while they recorded the main idea, evidence unrelated to the main idea, a glow piece of feedback, and a grow piece of feedback.

On Tuesday, nearly fifty visitors toured our school from Houston ISD.  Here are our visitors recording their Knows and Need-to-Knows about our school on our class windows and our visitors interacting with student tour guides.

On Tuesday, students in Ms. Valderrama’s AudioVisual class finished recording and editing their films.  When I asked the team in front of the green screen what they were recording, they said a car chase.  I asked them how they were going to film a car chase without cars and they said – with green screen.

Tuesday during school, several Manor New Tech students competed in the district-wide chess tournament.  One of our students advanced all the way to the final bracket and won third place in the competition.

Tuesday after school, the Robotics teams held a recruitment meeting to introduce potential new members to FIRST Robotics.  Dr. Erickson and several alumni stopped by for the meeting.  Dr. Erickson gifted the team a 2013 Woodie Flowers blue banner as a token for us to remember him.  Blue banner aside, the growth of our program’s resources and skills over the years is the main part of his legacy to our team.

Wednesday after school, Manor High School hosted the Innovative Teaching and Learning Showcase.  Schools from throughout the district participated in this great event.  The student in the top left created greeting cards that lit up when you pressed buttons on them.  The student in the top right used ScratchJr to show me how to program.  The bottom panels show Mr. Adeboyejo and Ms. Castanon presenting their science and math projects to students attending the event.

Tuesday and Wednesday evening, the seniors presented their yearlong Senior Projects.  I was moved by all the presentations on Wednesday evening.  It was so cool to see how much students had grown as a result of the choices and commitments they saw through while completing their senior projects.  I got to see students grow from founding a feminist club, running a blood drive, getting involved in local and national politics, running a tutoring program, performing slam poetry, rebuilding a muscle car and writing a fantasy fiction novel.

All day Thursday, elementary school students from throughout Manor ISD competed in the Annual Elementary Robotics competition.  FRC 2789 TEXplosion members served as judges throughout the day.  They also programmed our competition robot to deliver the trophies to the winners of the competition.  It was so neat to see how well the students worked to program and build their robots to complete the competition challenges.  Each challenge was created by students and teachers at a different elementary school.  I believe that they produced the most creative and complex set of challenges ever seen at the Annual Elementary Robotics competition.

Thursday evening, we hosted our Annual Manor New Tech Awards Ceremony.  Parents, teachers and students gathered to celebrate all students’ hard work in their Content Areas, Clubs, and Learning Outcomes.  We also announced our Valedictorian and Salutatorian and celebrated the record amount of scholarships our seniors have been rewarded this year.

Throughout the week, Mr. Ray’s Senior Science Research students taught mini lessons focused around really cool science demos.  Here are seniors preparing an extra large batch of raspberry flavored rock candy.

Here is a Whoosh bottle demonstration run by another team of seniors.  In this demo, students let ethanol evaporate into ethanol vapor inside a jug.  Then (with the help of Mr. Ray), they lit the vapor.  The resulting whoosh (flame and sound) emitted from the bottle was pretty stunning.

Here is the invisible bottle demo, fluorescent jello, and an attempt at elephant toothpaste.

On Friday, our school hosted a College & Careers Fair that was attended by our freshman, sophomores, and juniors.

On Friday afternoon, we held our Annual Talent Show.   For the first time, we showcased written and visual art at the show with displays that showed our students’ poetry and art work.

Our students displayed a lot of talent during the show.  Our audience cheered on all our performers – from the most confident to the most nervous.  Several students sang, played instruments, rapped and performed slam poetry.  We even had a surprising punk act that featured one student screaming funny lyrics while accompanied by a friend on kazoo and friends doing interpretive dances.

We concluded the talent show with our second Annual Teacher Lip Sync Battle.   The students were really happy to see our staff let loose while they performed.  We sold tickets to raise money for Operation MNTHS, our student-run new student orientation day that will run this August in the week before school starts.  We raised a quarter of our T-shirt budget by selling Lip Sync Battle voting tickets.  🙂

Finally, all this week, I had the pleasure of working with Manor New Tech’s brand new academic dean – Claudia Acevedo!  She’s amazingly talented and she cares very deeply about our school.  What a great addition to our team!  Whoohoo!