another year in history

It's the time of the school year when for a couple of weeks everything else is shelved and the girls get to work taking all their research of the months before and putting it into presentation-ready form for the Historica Fair. They learn about a specific area of history but also learn research, organization, and presentation as they described their project and answered questions for the judges. We had three projects from our house this year, for the last time as next year R will have passed the grade 9 upper age limit.



M covered the story of Vincent Coleman, hero of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. A very cool story (the vignette that inspired her to research this is here), we found newspapers from the days after the event at the National Archives and she learned about his life and even covered the possibility that he didn't stop the train.



A had a sort of followup to last year's project on Vimy Ridge, as one of the soldiers from the cemetery there was brought back to Canada in 2000 to lie in state and be buried as our Unknown Soldier. She learned about the tomb's history and structure, built a scale model of it, and reported on the unknown's last journey to Ottawa.



R was back after a year off and revisited a topic of a few years back, this time in much more detail and depth. She learned about the New England Planters, a group of immigrants to Canada from (you guessed it) New England to take up free land left behind after the Acadians were expelled. This group included some of our ancestors who were, pretty much, land grabbers. She learned about changes this group brought in construction and government, as well as the back stories of how they came to live in Nova Scotia.


They did a great job. A took first prize in her age group at the fair, but all three girls are able to go on to Regionals in April.