This History Day project exhibit by Katelyn Guckian, Ella Heminway and Maddy Langley is one of several projects that will be going to the Regional History Day competition in March. Photo by Donna MacKenzie
Several Honeoye Falls-Lima Middle School students will be refining their History Day projects based on questions and suggestions from teachers and community members made during the Middle School’s History Day Fair on January 23.
This year’s theme for National History Day competition is Triumph and Tragedy.
Projects moving on to the Regional competition in March at the Genesee Country Village and Museum are The Rochester Orphanage Asylum Fire, a live performance by Clara Bradley, Anneliese Ekholm, Olivia Gangi and Gina Piccirilli; Erie Canal, a video documentary by Christopher Brassie, Noah Carlson and Carter Parker; Jonestown, a video documentary by Robert Brown, Bailey Burdett and Eli Webster; Peace Corps, a video documentary by Claire Francis, Alana Khona and Cayla Lawrence; Rise and Fall of the Lehigh Valley Railway, a video documentary by Parker Hordon, Gavin Letendre and Adam Winship; Holocaust and Concentration Camps, a website by Kaitlin Blodgett, Sophia Dulieu and Rachel Levine; KKK, a website by Haley Cardot, Brooke Fugate and Ivy Yates; Manhattan Project, a website by Thea Ackerman, Sophia Bagley and Alia Spaker; and Stock Market Crash of 1929, an exhibit by Katelyn Guckian, Ella Heminway and Maddy Langley.
“This year, we suggested to the students that they try to focus on local topics and many of them did such as the girls who worked on the Rochester Orphanage Asylum Fire which occurred in the early 1900s and the group which did the video documentary on the Rise and Fall of the Lehigh Valley Railroad,” Middle School Social Studies teacher Zachary Clarry said. “We also encouraged kids that if they had a personal connection to a possible topic for the project to pursue that project so we had one group who presented a website project on the Oklahoma City Bombing because one student’s grandmother passed away in that bombing.”
Each year, the National History Day Project gets students to researching a topic connected to a certain theme. Students need to show the positive and negative impacts of their project topic. They can choose various ways of presenting the project: short research papers, trifold exhibits, websites, video documentaries or performances. At HF-L the entire student body works on various projects with the sixth-graders doing short research papers and the seventh-graders a paper and an exhibit.
“We decided to involve every student four years ago,” Clarry said. “This year, the sixth-graders’ projects deal with Ancient Egypt and the seventh-graders focused their projects on the American Revolution because that was the unit they were studying at the time we started the projects. The eighth-graders have the option of basing their project on anything that occurred from the time after Lincoln’s death to the present.”
The projects by the eighth-graders are usually either technology-based, in the form of a website or video documentary, or are live performances. In addition to the live performance on the Rochester Orphanage Asylum Fire, the Middle School had one other live performance, Radical Republicans, by Jonas Coleman, Maegan Frame, Jason Howard, Molly Kraynik and David Tuller, on the Radical Republicans after the Civil War.
“We had one group who wanted to do a video game using the Great Depression as their topic but we do not have a computer program that would allow that,” Clarry said. “So, they created a script and made it like an adventure game, much like Oregon Trail.”
In addition to those projects going on to the Regional competition, other eighth-grade projects were video documentaries on Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus (by Kylie Carter, Amber Grillo and Ava Recktenwald), Creation of the International Space Station (by Lula Camp, Isabelle Dague and Emeline Odell), Invention and Growth of Basketball (by Grace Hoffman and Addy Schiedel), Rise of Disney (by Abrey Cates, Sydney Proctor and Sierra West), Susan B. Anthony (by Riley Greenich, Claire Puchades and Lily Quackenbush), Apollo Program (by Noah Adams, John Boyce and Zach Schayes), George Eastman (by Blake Petraitis, Conlan Rorick and Jack Wirth), Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (by Aubrey Bent, Sophia Burke and Kylie Mehring), U.S. Citizenship Process (by Nick Bastion, Nick Boggio and Daniel Vullo) and San Francisco Fire (by Raina Bonilla-Petrie and Paige Fazekas) and websites on 9/11 (by Andrew Balascio and Andrew Lamonica), Concentration Camps (by Chris Colgan, Levi Cross and Preston Yates), Branch Davidians (by Kayleen Colyer and Nina Scott), Great Depression (by Robert Cohen and Evan Marra McGregor), Polio Epidemic (by Avery Brooks Gaylord, Colin Fanning and John Irvine), Annexation of Hawaii (by Mia Arena, Kaila Bartolloti and Ella Clark), Genesee Brewing Company (by Colton Milled, Bryce Smith and Trent Wager), Battle of Midway (by Lana Fisk and Maren Gregg), Manhattan Project (by Tylynn Graef, Cameron McDonald, Caeden Quinn and Mateo Wolfe), Abby Wambach (by Alexa Fanghanel, Maria Karipidis and Emily White), Martin Luther King, Jr. (by Taylor Blythe and Elizabeth Smith), The Battle of Verdun (by Carson Joint, Trevor Reese and Nate Weber), Rochester Subway (by Dylan Feszczyszyn, Athan Karras and Jonas Koch), Battle of the Somme (by Haden Eby, Gabe Falco and Finley Gloor), Rise and Fall of Kodak Corp (by Audri McHugh and Kiley Thompson), September 11th (by Sydney Trotto and Izabela Woloszuk), John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil (by Ben Haefner), History of McDonalds (by Owen Garaflo, Donnell Hall and Chris V), Rochester Underground Railroad (by Carlee Bears and Marlee Green), Pearl Harbor (by Grant Larsen, Tyler Parrish and Robert Schillenger), Oklahoma City Bombing (by Maddie Hobaica, Samantha Picciotti and Brinlee Smith), Battle of Stalingrad (by Jack Harvey and Nolan Smith) and Rise of Totalitarianism (by Joey Morroco, Kyle Reese and Brayden Trybuskiewicz).
