Finley Yorker Club Welcomes New Members

The J. Taylor Finley Yorker club is for seventh and eighth graders who have an interest in history and a desire to dig a little bit deeper into it.

The club promotes the study of history and helps its member develop a true appreciation of it. The organization’s faculty advisor is social studies teacher Jarrad Richter.

Members of the organization strengthen and refine their historical thinking and research skills. The club seeks to “facilitate the creation of a theme based project for the annual National History Day initiative. Finley students have earned honors in the contest in past years.

Yorker club membership is open to any Finley seventh and eighth graders. The group typically meets on Thursdays from early October through the last week of February.

Interested in learning more about the Yorker club or are you ready to join? Send a message to Mr. Richter at jrichter@hufsd.edu.

The 2024 National History Day contest requires research to be framed within the theme of “Turning Points in History.” A 64 page theme book is posted on Huntington UFSD’s website.

“To celebrate our 50th anniversary, National History Day’s theme will be ‘Turning Points in History,’” according to the non-profit NHD organization. “This year’s theme invites you to consider questions of time and place, cause and effect, change over time, and impact and significance.”

Students will conduct months of research to create their projects, which will then be submitted in one of five formats: historical research papers, museum exhibits, video or computer generated documentaries, theatrical performances, and websites. Besides individual entries, all categories except papers can be completed by a group of up to five students.

“A turning point in history is more than just an important event that happened a long time ago,” according to NHD. “It is more than a new idea or a particular action taken by an individual. A turning point is an idea, event, or action that directly, or sometimes indirectly, causes change.”

Huntington UFSD’s National History Day local competition will be held on February 8 at 6:30 p.m. at the high school. The top finishers in each of the categories will advance to the Long Island regional finals in March at Hofstra University. State History Day will be held in late April in Oneonta.

Huntington has enjoyed enormous success in the state contest. The national finals will be held in June at the University of Maryland, College Park.