| 04/07/2007 |
| CHS students have been making history (projects) |
| Jessica Selby , Daily TImes |
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COVENTRY - For the past few months, several students at Coventry
High School have been immersed in history. They've been busy researching, writing and preparing their research projects for the school's annual National History Day event. All of those options were represented at the school's history day fair. A selection of teachers from the history department toured the library where the projects were set up and judged each one based on a set of criteria established by the National History Day standards. The teachers selected just a handful of projects from among those submitted to be entered into the state competition scheduled for April 28 at Providence College. CHS sophomore student Emily Hawver performed a 10-minute skit devoted to "Rosie the Riveter." The short play, Hawver said, depicted women hard at work in the shipyards of this country some time in the 1940s around World War II while the men were off to war. Hawver said "reading and performing just comes naturally" to her, so a performance just seemed like the best fit for presenting her project. The students were not required to participate in the school's annual history day event. Those students who opted not to were offered an alternative assignment - to write a critical book review. Samantha Andrea, Emily Whittaker, Zach Johansen, Steve Alden and Kristen Souza, who are juniors this year and were offered the option to do either assignment, opted to participate in the History Day events instead They said "as crazy as it may sound, we thought it would be better to do than the critical book review." More than 40 hours later and with slight hesitations in their voices, they said they were all still pretty content with their decision. Their documentary, based on the Challenger mission, was named as the school's "group winner." As group winner, their documentary is entered in the state competition making them eligible for scholarships and other recognition opportunities. A number of other students will be joining the documentary team at the state competition. Shori DeGraide, an eleventh-grader, will be presenting her individual poster board exhibit for the "World's Columbian Exposition" and tenth-grader Alyssa Rogers will be joining her in that same category for her project on the "Providence Performing Arts Center." Among the groups that created poster board exhibits, 10th-grade students Lexi Pullano and Rebecca Ponder were selected winners eligible for the state competition for their project on Zambarano Memorial Hospital. The girls said the biggest challenge they faced when trying to complete their exhibit was to get all they wanted on the poster board and still meet the requirements established by the National History Day committee. Those requirements set a word limit of 500 for the exhibit and trying to tell the story of the tuberculosis hospital in under 500 words was, they said, "nearly impossible." So they tried to find a way around that and, in the end, they were successful. "We knew that there was the 500 word limit which we were obviously going to go over but then we learned that direct quotes didn't count in that 500 word max so we ended up using a lot of direct quotes from people associated with the hospital to tell the story and I think it ended up working out great that way," Ponder said. Brittany Marsocci and Kayla Davis were also selected by the school judges to take their group exhibit entitled "JFK: An Unfinished Life," to the state competition. Brenna Pugliese won the school competition for the paper category and Nicole Testa was one of the individual winners for her project on the Blackstone River, as was Catalina Snape for her project entitled "The Little Rock Nine." Kerri Bestwick joined her classmate Emily Hawver in the performance category, earning a spot in the state competition for her rendition of the "Voyage on the Titanic." Matthew Brissette, the CHS Social Studies Department Chairman, said each and every year he is more and more impressed with the finished products that come out of the school's annual History Day Fair. "Since we started our History Day program six years ago, the students' projects are continually getting better," he said. "Our students and teachers have worked really hard this year and I feel that we are sending some good work to the state competition at PC on April 28." "The students that won researched over 40 sources of historical data and created historical projects on a par with many college students," he said. "I am continually amazed at the abilities of our students." The projects have become so in-depth and demanding that Brissette, with the support of many of teachers at CHS, has managed to integrate the National History Day program into the school department's curriculum. Many of the students who participate in the National History Day event can use their projects as a baseline for the required Capstone projects, according to Brissette. That alone, he said, "is one of the great benefits of the National History Day program for our students."
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