Nine years ago, we blended history, public speaking, and performance for a unique homeschool event. Since then, it’s become an annual tradition and we just celebrated GMAH’s 2023 National History Day Performance.
How It Works
Students choose someone from history to learn about. It can be anyone they’re interested in, from ancient times to mid-20th century. I write a play that brings the characters together and the students prepare individual speeches about their person. Through the speeches and the story line of the play, the students get to learn about the character and everyone else’s historical figures.
It’s a low-key production with no fancy staging and minimal rehearsals. We portray the characters with as much accuracy as possible, but we do add in a few fun touches to keep things interesting and fun. This year, we changed ‘location’ for each scene and the students not in that scene used props to match the sound effects for the scene.
NHD Background
The performance is inspired each year by the annual theme of National History Day, an academic program that encourages research and projects in various categories by 6th – 12th grade students with competitions at the regional, state, and national level. While our performance is not a precise fit to the ‘real’ NHD, it has a common end goal – to engage students in history by following their interests.
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