APUSH students are taking on a more personal project with their final project of the year that aims to show how their family fits into history.

“Students will have the opportunity to share​ their story and personal history,” teacher Allen Harris said. “They will create a presentation that answers what it means to them to be an American. I feel this project can help students understand the importance of studying American History and to better understand the nation they live in.”

For the project, students will be presenting a slideshow on Monday explaining how their past has shaped their idea of being an American.

“I feel like this project will help me learn the information better,” junior Ben Hennel said. “I think that it is a good way to do it because it not only relates to me but also my family. The benefits of researching my personal history for this project is that I actually think about how history affected me and what I will do going forward.”

For the project students are encouraged to look back at their own as well as their family’s past experiences and relate it to history.

“I will be doing a slide presentation explaining what being American means to me as a minority,” junior Justin Chen said. “I think the benefit is to better understand the motives of my parents and ancestors.”

For Hennel this project is a good way to understand how his grandparents’ fight in Vietnam is still affecting him today.

“I will be doing a slideshow about what being an American means to me,” he said. “It will be about my family’s history, how my grandparents fought in Vietnam and how that shaped my image of the American spirit.”

The purpose of the project is to allow students to make a personal connection with events from history and learn how they were affected from it.

“The purpose of the project is to answer the EQ by connecting their own personal history with concepts from American History that they learned in the process of taking AP US History this year,” Harris said. “The APUSH team felt this project would allow students to make authentic connections between the topics they ​studied in AP US History to their own lives and experiences to better understand how they might have shaped their understanding of what it means to be an American.”