S'More Community News - NPHS

I am Liz Odle and I am one of three fabulous Family and Consumer Science (FCS) teachers at NPHS. I am originally from Salt Lake City, Utah and met my wonderful husband while attending college at BYU, where I graduated with a degree in Family and Consumer Science Education. After 7 years of marriage and 2 kids he finally talked me into moving to North Platte to live near his family. I subbed in this school district for 7 years waiting for an FCS position to open up and I have now been a full time staff member for 6 years. Being an FCS teacher means teaching a wide variety of classes. This school year I am teaching Intro to FCS, Fundamentals of Nutrition and Culinary Essentials, Child Development, Early Childhood Education, and Textile Construction. I also offer an Early Childhood Internship for students that wish to complete the Early Childhood Pathway. This term I am teaching Intro to FCS, Child Development, and Early Childhood Education.

Intro to FCS students are just wrapping up their unit on Foods where we have talked about where our food comes from. The differences between home cooked, fast food and restaurant meals both in price and calorie content. We have had Lori Bergman, the owner/manager of Double Dips, come talk to us about being an entrepreneur in the food industry and what it takes to manage a food business. Our final project is Cupcake Wars where the students make a plan on how they will decorate their cupcakes, they make a poster for how they would market their cupcakes, they will execute their design by decorating cupcakes, then they will reflect on their experience by comparing and contrasting their plan to their final product. They will then mount pictures of their cupcakes to be displayed and I will create a slideshow of the final product to be voted on by the district. Our next unit will be Textiles where students will learn about fibers and fabric and how to upcycle an article of clothing.

In Child Development students are finishing up their unit on developmental theorists. Throughout this unit they have learned about various theorists and how they have influenced our view on child development. Our favorites were Erickson, Piaget and Baumrind. Our next unit will be on pregnancy, conception, and infants. Students will be having a gender reveal party this week to discover if their flour babies will be a boy or a girl. Next week they will be tasked with carrying around a 4 or 5 lb bag of flour/sugar in a car seat for a week and caring for it. This will give students a taste of what it feels like to be a parent of a newborn. This project is always highly anticipated by students. It is the first question I get every term, “When are we doing flour babies?”

Early Childhood Education students are wrapping up their unit on infants and care of newborns. They have done some amazing projects. They have tasted baby food, broken and taped together flower pots all in the hopes of teaching them how different individuals can be, and how we all have different stuff in our lives that can affect our learning. We have been out in the community observing infants at Ladybug Crossing and Trucks and Tiaras. Then we came back to the classroom to compare and contrast the differences. For their summative project for this unit students are writing a lesson plan for an infant and will be going back to Ladybug Crossing to teach their infants. Students will then come back to the classroom and evaluate how their lesson went and how they could improve upon it. Our next unit will be Toddlers and we are excited to observe and learn how to best teach them.

The NPHS Music Department has been busy in all of the best ways to start off this school year! Our Blue and Gold Singers performed for the first day back to school for our staff and integrated this year’s school theme “The Wild Card” into their performance! This performance is always a great way to get our teachers excited about the upcoming school year!

Our Blue and Gold Singers, Mixed Choir and Concert Choir held their first performance of the year in October and it was an awesome night celebrating their talents! The Mixed Choir has done a great job getting to know each other and work together as an ensemble. The Blue and Gold Singers gave an energetic performance of a medley from the Broadway musical, “In the Heights”, and the Concert Choir performed this year’s All-State Choir repertoire.

Speaking of All-State Choir, we had 8 students who were selected through a rigorous audition to be a part of the 2022 All-State Choir this November on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. Those students are seniors Carly Purdy, Joshua San Miguel, Jacen Smith and Breanna Lundgreen; sophomores Phinehas Wiezorek, Marisa Pfeifer and Rebekah Daily; and freshman Henry Cline. This is a tremendous honor and these students deserve many accolades!

And finally, we are beginning to prepare for this year’s musical, Mary Poppins! The show has been cast and the excitement is beginning to grow! The performance dates are March 16-19, 2023 and rehearsals will begin right after Christmas break! We were also extremely blessed to participate in a Nebraska High School Theater Academy Master Class with Broadway performer, Elizabeth Earley right here on our home stage! She toured with Mary Poppins for four years and acted as the dance captain for three of those years. Our students spent about 90 minutes with her and learned some choreography for Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Hi! I’m Sasha Welch and I teach dual credit math. Right now, I have Calculus, College Algebra, and Trigonometry. In Trig, we have just started our graphing unit, in which we learn how to graph trigonometric functions and apply them to situations like weather, tides, and sound. The first picture is of our “spaghetti sine curves” where we learned how to create sine waves from the unit circle. College Algebra is also graphing, but they are graphing polynomial and rational functions. Next week we will begin our unit on Conic Sections! In Calculus, we are transitioning from derivatives to integrals and are finding the area under curves. As the photo shows, Calculus students are experts at working together and encouraging each other!

In U.S. History we are exploring the amazing story of America. Where we’ve been, where we are, and where might we be going. Currently we are looking at the events, places, and people that lead our country into World War 2. Students have been able to use primary sources from the period to help them sharpen their historical knowledge of how the world found itself embroiled in war for the second time in a 30 year period. Classes also had the opportunity to choose an significant event from the war and conduct their own historical analysis. Topics ranged from Pearl Harbor, to women's contribution to the war effort, to The Battle of the Bulge. This time period gives classes the amazing opportunity to reflect on relevant cultural, social, political, and racial issues from the time period and compare them to where we are as a country today.