Joy's High Honor Project

I hope you don't mind me bragging a bit about Joy in this post. I think she deserves it! At the beginning of the school year, those with high enough grades were presented with the option of doing a high honors project. They could pick any subject they would like to do it on, but they had to work on it for at least 30 hours plus an additional 10 hours of community service relating to the project. Of course, my over-achiever daughter dove right in! She decided to do it on History and make a mural of the history of the US. Another requirement is it had to benefit the city of Mapleton (where her school is located). She started it in October, 2010 and finished the end of March, 2011 and worked on it a total of 55 hours plus the 11 hours community service, then she had to write a full page report about her experience with it called a reflection. I have to say this was done all of her own will and motivation. In fact we had to discourage her from spending even more time on it than she did. See, she had a plan all laid out of how she wanted to do it thinking it would take her about 30 hours. After she had gotten about 40 hours into it, we had to make her simplify some of her plans, otherwise it would have taken her 70+ hours! Once she was done the mural, for the comm. service, she spent the next three weeks going around to almost all the history classes in her school (there are 1500+ students in her Jr. High) presenting her project. She had a little speech explaining it and then would answer questions. Then she had a pre-final presentation where she presented it to all the history teachers in the school (about five) and the principal, and then a final presentation where she was able to present it to her extended family. It turned out to be 12.5 feet long and too wide to fit in a laminator, so I had to laminate it by hand, which was very hard! So, here's her masterpiece!! Make sure and click on each picture to look at it bigger so you can see the details better.

The first third. She drew each state and labeled it with the capital and postal abbrev. Those represent the stars of the flag.

The second third. The stripes along the bottom have descriptions and pictures of the wars, and sketches of all 44 presidents

The last third has sketches of important symbols of our country, Utah, and Mapleton city and some information.

All 12 1/2 feet!

Here you can see some of the details better. I love the drawings of the presidents. The hair on some of them is hilarious!

Most of the students did English projects where all they did was read a book and write a report on it, and no one had done a History project for several years, so the teachers were all really excited about Joy's project. They said they were amazed with everything she did on it and had never seen another in comparison.
This doesn't affect her grade or give her extra credit or even go on her record for college since she's only in 8th grade. So, what does she get for doing this? A really cool plaque and a trip to Hogle Zoo. She's very excited for her reward, but as for me, that wouldn't have been even close to motivate me to do anything like that! I am in awe of my daughter!