Did you know that over a half a million students are in history day each year. North Scott history day students meet to learn new things and work on their project, whether it be exhibit, documentary, website, paper, or performance about a person or thing in history. In the Junior high life science room, from 3:30 to 5:10 pm the students will try for a chance to make it to nationals.
History day teaches students many things. First it teaches students researching skills, the students need to find reliable websites to get information from, in college you need research skills or you will use a unreliable source. These students also learn teamwork which is a very important life skill. If they work in a group, 2 people might have 2 different ways to get past a road block so you have to work together to get past it. Another thing it improves is your reading. If you are looking for certain things in a text, often you would receive good reading skills. In addition learn problem solving. If you are making a documentary and a picture wont show up you have to problem solve figuring out what happened and how to fix it. Finally you learn about history, The projects themselves can’t have taken place less than 25 years ago, hence the name, history day. And some of the topics are not very well known so you will be learning things you didn’t know.
Some people don’t know the sheer mass of the things needed to create a project. Mackenzie Bohr said “Sometimes you don’t have enough information so she had to look harder.” You have to do over 20 annotated bibliographies and make a thesis, write a process paper, find quotes. The final step is putting it all together to create a finished product whether it be a exhibit, documentary, website, paper, or play by February 8 to go to a competition.
After they finish their projects they go for judging. The first competition is on February 8, this is the North Scott competition. Then about 4 weeks later there is the district competition on March 6. If you succeed and move on you are going to nationals. If you made it to nationals you have a quality project because over half a million students are in history day each year. The nationals are on June 11-15.
This is the huge undertaking that these kids take on when they say that they will do history day. These students learn new things, work hard and go to competitions. As Zachary Johnson would say the entire thing is a 9 out of 10. By Isaac