National History Day

How can you get students interested in history and at the same time develop excellent 21st century skills? Are you wondering how improve your students' writing, research and analytical skills?  Look no further than National History Day!

Our school just wrapped up their 2 month National History Day program, run by our social studies department. We had our school wide competition, selected our top contestants and they will soon be moving on to regionals.

National History Day is an academic program that challenges students to research and develop projects relating to an annual theme. Students compete at the school level, regionally, state wide and eventually nationally. Students choose a category: exhibit, website, documentary, performance or paper to demonstrate their knowledge of a topic of choice, relating to the annual theme. This year’s theme is “Rights and Responsibilities.”

This is our school’s second year of participating in NHD. Last year our entire school participated. As we considered our options for this year, we decided to require only our 6th grade students, and select classes from our high school. 

A great hurdle we face implementing NHD is parent and student buy in. NHD is a lengthy process and labor intensive. Yet, the experience can truly be life changing for a student. As our social studies department reflected upon our choices for student involvement, our 7th grade teachers commented on how advanced their students were in regards to research skills, interpretation of historical materials and their exceptional ability to develop proper citations. We knew that most of these skills came from their experience the previous year in NHD. That confirmed it for us, our 6th grade students were going to participate in NHD. We left it open as an option for the upper grades.

As we completed our NHD preparations and competitions this past week I was incredibly proud of what our students had achieved. Our 11 and 12 year students started out by defining rights and responsibilities. They then chose a topic that was at least 20 years old that they could relate to this year's theme. Then they researched and cited, in APA format, their sources. Last, but definitely not least, they took that information and developed either an exhibit, paper, performance, website or a documentary. Some students worked on their own and others worked in groups, yet they all learned valuable time management skills. If that wasn’t enough, it all culminated in them presenting their projects to judges from the community. They were so proud of themselves, as was I! 

I have no doubt that my students will always remember their NHD experience, some fondly, and well, maybe some not so fondly. Yet, each one of them will remember the excellent skills they developed in the process. I highly recommend incorporating it into your school’s history curriculum!