Texas History Day

When I worked in Galveston, I became involved with the Texas History Day regional and state competition. For a number of years I organized and judged the regional competition, and went to Austin to judge the state competition. I've judged exhibits, performance, documentary, and the "Oral History" special award. I haven't been able to judge in Austin in the last few years, but have been judging preliminary websites from my office about two weeks before History Day.

This past Saturday, I traveled to Austin to judge the Junior Individual Exhibits, having already turned in this year's preliminary Senior Website rankings. These students are SO SMART! Even the ones that didn't advance through the preliminaries did a remarkable job. Judging History Fair is wonderful, challenging, and inspiring. This year I noted with pride that in both of the categories I judged, my top two (from preliminaries) placed in the State as 2nd and 3rd place.

The top two in each category advance to the National History Day competition held at the University of Maryland, College Park (Washington D.C. area) on June 15-19.

History Fair is offered at the Junior (6th-8th) and Senior (9th-12th) levels, but sadly our current ISD does not participate. Maybe I will change that when Cameron advances into Middle School.