Students learn States and Capitals for U.S History Competition

Submitted by tiffanie.miley on

Each eighth grader in Mr. Greg Shields’s U.S History classes will memorize all 50 states and capitals. This year Mr. Shields has come up with a game to help students memorize them; it’s called Around the World. All the class periods have three people who are the fastest at saying the states, and they compete against the other three fastest people in the other classes.

Around the World is usually a game students play in math, but Mr. Shields has come up with a way to help with the states too. Two students stand by each other at the front of the room, and Mr. Shields points to a state and whoever says it first continues competing with the next person in line, and so on and so on until the last two students are left. The fastest student is the one who beats the most people in the class.

Addison Bowers an eighth grader at SJHS, said, “This is a really cool idea to help learn the states better.” Addison was one of the many people in the state competition, so it must have really helped her and got her to study. Mr. Shields said, “I started this [game] at another school where I used to teach. A student told me about this game that they played in math so I thought why not use it to learn the states. Then when I came here to Springville Junior High I decided to find an overall winner of all my classes. I love competition, and it brings out the best performance in the students also.”

The competition between Mr. Shields’s classes happened on September 16th and 17th during Quest Time. There were 16 students in the final competition, which  included Stacey Stapel, Ryan Gage, Lindsay Johnson, Bethany Allen, Shannon Lott, Jacob Mortensen, Sarah Clark, Nina Tuttle, Rachel Standley, Nicole Dallin, Abby Mangum, Preston Adams, Andalyn Hall, Addie Bowers, and Sean Tedrow. All were in the competition.

The final championship was between Jacob Mortensen and Nicole Dallin, with Nicole Dallin being the overall winner. Congratulations to Nicole! According to Mr. Shields, the winner of each class got a candy bar, and the overall winner,  Nicole Dallin, received a gift card to the Art City Trolley restaurant, and the top sixteen received a Blow Pop sucker.

Attributions
Michelle Herrera, SJHS Staff Writer