National History Day is required participation as part of history class for all Freshman. The first and second place winners go to Washington DC to compete in the finals. At the beginning of the year, the students complete a form and indicate if they will go to Washington. If one person in the group can not attend, the whole group can not go. Emersyn checked the box of NOT willing to go to Washington due to the dive trip. Your group is assigned to you by the teachers. She was hoping she would still get students that cared even if Washington wasn’t an option…and she did. Her teacher, Ms Farley, put three of the dive kids together – Emersyn, Hayden Dubniczki and Jacob Eng. They had a 4th in their group until Christmas when he moved back to America.

The categories for work were dramatic performance, an exhibit, papers of distinction, documentary films, paper interview and website. Emersyn and her group chose to do an exhibit on William Shakespeare. Many hours go into the research, construction and presenting of the project. We arrived at 1pm to realise we missed the judging, but we did enjoy walking around to see the various exhibits.

Emersyn’s group project on William Shakespeare.

Other exhibits that were well done for NHD:

Wangari Maathai (1st place winner)

Catherine the Great (2nd place winner)

Feng Shan H0 (3rd place winner)

Superman

Hildegard Von Bingen

I was impressed with the work and the content of the various exhibits. We were able to watch some of the presentation of awards for the winners before we left in different directions.