School History Day events are happening fast and furious in these early days of February, and students are making changes and updates to their projects. This series of blogs will offer hints for each category to help students make the best possible showing at school and possibly regional events.
Exhibits
- Be conservative with font and color choices. Use readable fonts, and no more than two fonts on the board. Make sure the colors match the subject matter. Bright pinks and greens are not appropriate for a project on the Holocaust.
- Use a variety of images, in a variety of sizes. If all your images are tiny photographs of someone's face, it doesn't tell us anything. Use photographs in large enough sizes that we can tell what's going on, but also use primary documents on your board. Newspaper headlines, advertisements, propaganda and letters are fantastic for exhibits.
- Divide your project into sections. It is much easier to read and understand a project if it is cleanly divided into sections with clear headlines on top.
- Make sure your thesis statement is front and center. The thesis should be one of the first things we read, so it should be in the middle of the project, toward the top, in large, readable font.
- Steer clear of gimmicks! Your research and analysis is what is important, not necessarily the props sitting in front of your exhibit, the PowerPoint slide show running on your laptop in front of your exhibit, the Christmas lights strung across the top, or the scale model of the Battle of Gettysburg you built. When in doubt: words and images pasted on your board.
- Be neat and organized. Don't discount the importance of being neat. Cut straight, glue straight, organize your information. This will make it much easier for us to read and understand, and it will show that you took some time to be clear.