elise blas AND librar*

Yesterday I had the privilege of judging Wyoming History Day. Students from all over the state gathered to show off their knowledge about important people in history. Some of the entries were amazing and I couldn’t believe those kids were in 7th grade! Others needed some work, but what is a project but an on-going learning process?

I know the students had to do the projects completely on their own and parents and teachers couldn’t help them. I wasn’t sure how much this limited assistance. Could the students ask for help with formatting? Proof reading? Realizing I was judging 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, they could have benefits from a quick once-over to find grammatical errors. And glaring misinformation.

One shining point of the day is when three girls told the judges they didn’t use the internet for research, they used books because books are more reliable. This was a huge relief that kids know that! Some previous entries in the contest used the internet exclusively and it made me cringe. But those girls.. they saved their peers! At least in my mind.

This was a voluntary contest and I was very pleased to see just how many kids in Wyoming cared enough about history to participate! I hope I can judge next year’s History Day in Kansas.

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This entry was posted by Elise on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.