Phileas Fogg may have traveled around the world in 80 days, but Madison High School’s freshman class could see the world this week just by traveling around the library.
A quick walk around the ninth grade World History Fair in the library on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week revealed displays from all over the world, the culmination of three month’s of hard work by the freshman class. According to Social Studies Intervention Specialist Mike Morris, more than 160 displays covered the library, the most displays the fair has had since its creation five years ago.
“I think there were a lot of kids that chose to work on their own, where in the past more kids had teamed up,” said Morris.
Librarian Michelle Frederick added that larger class sizes could also contribute to the record number of displays.
“But I think in general it’s because the students decided to do it individually, which is a tremendous amount of work to do it by yourself,” she said.
The freshmen participating in the World History Fair had their choice of any world history topic covered in the ninth grade curriculum, starting with the 1500s all the way to present day. Once a topic was picked, the students spent multiple days in the library using books, online encyclopedias and databases for research. Then it was off to the computer lab to find more information, print pictures and write captions.
The final step was obtaining the display board and putting all aspects of their research together to present to a small panel of judges during the World History Fair.
“Now we’re in the phase where we’ve talked a lot about presentation – how to present yourself, how to shake hands how to meet someone,” explained Frederick. “This prepares them for life as far as interviewing and knowing how to meet someone for the first time and make a good impression. We try to bring teachers in that they don’t know. I know that’s intimidating for them and they’ve nervous, but they do amazingly well.”
Freshman Jenna Messner said she was initially nervous giving her presentation, but once she remembered to slow down and smile she was able to relax. Messner chose WWII extermination camps as her topic.
“I’m so in love with learning about wars and the little things that were put together to make it one big issue for the whole world,” she said. “And just how one man, Hitler, can come through and take up a whole nation and make them all believe he’s right and war is good, and use the loss of WWI and convince them the Jews are bad.”
Messner said the most challenging part of her project was keeping the word count to 500 words or less. Her classmate Travis Nedrow, whose project was about the Warsaw Ghetto, said he felt similarly.
“There’s so much I could’ve included in this but we had to keep it under 500 words, I would’ve loved to include so much more information,” said Nedrow.
Nedrow said he picked the Warsaw Ghetto as his topic because of his interest in WWII.
“I can’t hardly believe something as terrible as this could happen just in the last 100 years, this seems like something that wouldn’t happen in modern times and it’s hard to believe it actually did,” he said.
Nedrow also noted he was initially nervous in giving his presentation and had to remember not to read from his board too often. Messner said it helped her to remember the judges are also interested in learning about the project, and to keep things interesting.
“Then time flies and you realize you talked for 10 minutes instead of five,” she said with a laugh. “It’s actually pretty fun to learn something and become the expert and to tell others about it.”
Both Morris and Frederick said this year’s freshmen have exceeded their expectations for the projects and presentations. After completing a process paper describing their process throughout the entire project and tallying the judges’ and peer judging scores, prizes will be given away sometime next week.
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised with what they’ve been able to do this year,” said Morris. “Some kids who maybe struggle with the written test aspects we might have in class come out here and excel with this area. They get creative and they’re able to talk, so I think it gives those kids a chance to show what they can do. They’ve really taken that and run with it.”
