National History Day

 We'd like to congratulate Ellis and Lillian, who got first place in the state of Maryland for Maryland History Day. They won the group documentary category for Middle School. It was a huge accomplishment, and we're so excited for them to go on to National History Day! Of course, National History Day (NHD) is typically held in exotic College Park, Maryland...a whopping 20 miles from our house. :) But it's even better this year, the entire event is virtual. So none of the excitement of travelling to a national competition. But they do win a cool t-shirt!

This project started out as an idea over the summer that Ellis and Lillian could work together on their project. They did a great job over the summer of brainstorming ideas and mediums (you can choose to make a website, display board, documentary, performance or research paper). They struggled a bit more with actually deciding and getting started on the project. So, as always happens, their plan to get a head start on the project melted away, and 2 weeks before the project was due, Mom was nagging, "don't you think you ought to get going??" It was quite the scene of drama and tears. Mom and Dad were insisting that it would take more than a day or two to make the video, and they needed to be panicking NOW! Ellis and Lillian were so mad at each other, they could hardly be in the same room with one another, and were pretty sure they didn't care if they flunked, as long as they didn't have to work on this project any more! Mom was 100% certain that she was never allowing any of her children to work together on a group project ever again. It was pretty miserable. The kids finally turned in their project, and declared that they were D.O.N.E. Even if they won and went to the county competition, they were NOT going to do ANY improvements. Final Answer. Well, Lillian wasn't quite so final, but since Ellis was, she went along.

Here's the video they submitted to the school competition:

Well, of course, they did win. Because their topic is fascinating and their video is really interesting, too. :) And they sat on that for a week. And after a bit, Ellis thought maybe they could make a few *small* edits to their movie. And, eventually, the re-wrote the whole script, re-filmed all the ASL, re-recorded the vocals, re-captioned, and uploaded. Ha!

Here's the second version of their video. In some ways, I didn't like it as much. It was more rushed. (Confession: the new video was too long, so they just bumped the speed up a little.) And they didn't look so grave about the destruction of the language - they smiled! Gasp! Ok, fine, just Lillian smiled. But they did add open captioning, which I thought was a great improvement, and some personal interviews, which were a great strength to their argument. And their finger spelling is a lot more smooth. So that's awesome. The video below is pre-open captioning, so you'll still have to turn on the CC. I couldn't get Ellis to send me the final version. She was afraid I'd post it all over the internet. What a silly thing to be afraid of.... 😆😉

By the time they'd reached the State competition, I think we all knew they'd made something special, and had a decent chance of getting some sort of award. So it was tough when they announced that the awards ceremony would be on a Sunday. We left the decision to Ellis and Lillian, and they both decided that they'd rather observe the Sabbath that participate in the MHD activities for the day. They told their teacher they wouldn't be watching, and if anything interesting happened, let them know. At 2:00, we were all very aware of what time it was. I was on the computer writing a letter to our family when a notification popped up, and my breath caught for a second. And I thought about ignoring it. But it was impossible to ignore, because the subject line was "YOU GOT FIRST PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I ran and showed it to Ellis and Lill. Ellis started jumping up and down and cheering, and Lillian just looked confused, because she thought I was showing her something in the letter that I was writing, and couldn't figure out what was so exciting in there. :) We laughed at Lillian, then showed her the email from Mr. Puracken, then we ALL jumped up and down and cheered and screamed, and made Sam run outside covering his ears. 

This time, there wasn't any discussion about if they would improve their video - they'd already thought of things they wanted to revise. So even though the judging feedback had almost nothing to suggest, they went ahead and re-wrote the script, re-recorded the ASL, re-recorded the voice-over, re-captioned, and re-compiled. Everything was beautiful, but then 3 days before the deadline, the computer ate the video and the caption file. ACK! They pulled a recent draft from YouTube and re-edited it, but they lost some of their flexibility, so for example, in some spots the captions cover up the ASL, and they can't change that. They did, however, fix the spelling error Mom caught after they'd submitted (they were allowed to re-submit.) So here's their almost-final version (except for the spelling error.) Again, some things I thought were better in the previous version, but I think this is a pretty good submission, and they can be proud of it. They did great research, and their signing is very clear. Good job, girls!! Thanks to all our friends who helped them.