On Wednesday January 18, all seventh-grade honors students presented their National History Day projects in the Performing Arts Room, P.A.R.  Teachers and volunteers from other schools evaluated each student or group’s work.  Winners for each category will be entered at the next level. 

Social studies teacher Mr. John De Gree said, “It was a fantastic event.”

In the P.A.R., there were multiple tables where students set up their work.  Everyone had a limited amount of time to put their projects up on display before judges from different schools walked around to interview and check on each student’s work. After an hour of evaluation, student peers had the task to pick their three favorite projects from each category and analyze one of the projects. This lasted four periods before each social studies class was excused, depending on period and group. 

“Seeing the judges at first scared me but once I talked to some it wasn’t that bad,” said National History Day paper winner Neo G. 

National History Day started early in the first semester for each seventh-grade honors social studies class. This year’s theme was “frontiers.”  Everyone had a choice of picking a topic and project type. Additionally, students could either do their project by themselves or be in a small group. They had multiple months to research and plan out their project while writing a process paper and annotated bibliography with teachers helping and providing tips for some categories in class or during tutoring hours. 

Seventh-grader William O. said, “Making sure everyone got their part of the project done by the end of the week was the most stressful part of National History Day.” 

After National History Day, the next upcoming history event is the History Faire. The History Faire will take place on April 21 with all seventh-grade history classes representing a country and competing. This all takes place on one day and seventh-grade students are able to do activities and donate the most points to their class. Each student has a different royal role in each class with all of them having different purposes.