Sigourney sixth grade students shine at state history fair

SIGOURNEY- Earlier this year, Sigourney sixth grade students participated in a history fair at Sigourney Elementary School. At the time, Amy Jones, sixth grade teacher for Sigourney Elementary School, said that the history fair was a culmination of a unit centered around National History Day.

“Our sixth graders have experienced national history day. They are now presenting the result of choosing a topic that was important in history, that goes along with our theme of ‘Triumph and Tragedy in History’. They had to choose the topic and do research and after they did research they had to choose from five different types of projects and come up with a project that would then show their learning, what they’ve learned from their research,” Jones said at the time.

Sixth graders from Sigourney Elementary presented a wide variety of programs, with a chance to move on to district, state, and even national level contests. Several sixth graders went to the district level where they were judged again. Three lucky sixth graders were then selected to go to the state level contest. Regan Clarahan and Hannah Hanselman were selected for their group performance, and Cera Haan was selected for her individual paper. Clarahan and Hanselman did a group performance on Jonas Salk and the fight against polio, while Cera Haan wrote a paper about Eileen Nearne, who was a part of the UKs Special Operations Executive during World War II. For Clarahan and Hanselman, their presentation was personal to them.

“My great-grandma had polio when she was six years old and that’s always kind of been something that she’s talked about to me,” Clarahan said of why she and Hanselman chose to do a performance on polio.

For Haan, her choice was based off or recognizing someone who hadn’t received much recognition in the past.

“I wanted to do something related to world war II and females in history that hadn’t really had their story told so I chose Eileen,” she said.

For more on this story and others, catch the May 29 edition of the News-Review.