For school this year, Charlie had to do a project for History Day.  It’s a yearly contest that students research and then submit a project to a national contest.  Winners are picked at the State level, and then move on to the National level.

This years theme was Communications, and students could pick the type of project, one of which was to build a webite.

What a perfect project!

After many solid choices, Charlie chose to write about Carrier Pigeons.  They’ve been around since early times, and before satelites and radios, they were used extensively to communicate behind enemy lines during the World Wars.

So Charlie, Amy, and I spent most of a weekend learning all we could about pigeons, and then Charlie had to write out paragraphs, along with citations, and gather pictures.  It had been a long time since I’ve had to do anything like that, and although it went a lot slower than we anticipated, it was fun to see her mind work through finding her voice and backing it up with facts.

I came in guns blazing and setting up a subdomain on this site, ready to teach Charlie WordPress, but alas their are rules and the students had to use a website builder designed for this event.  After getting up to speed, we were able to work through changing fonts, adding our images, creating menus and links, and many of the things I do from day to day.

What was maybe the coolest part of this project is Charlie saw something tangible that I do for work.  It’s pretty easy to identify what Amy does – she saves hands.  Several years ago, when Charlie was asked what I do, she said ‘Daddy talks on the phone’.  And websites and document composition maybe nerdy, but now I feel she understands a little better what I do sitting in front of my monitors – outside of being on the phone of course!

Charlie’s Website.