Oregon 2016

In November, the grade eight class of PLP went on a 7 day class road trip to the Oregon Coast, to learn about marine life and culture/history. This blog post is going to be about all the little and big adventures that went on in that week. So many amazing landmarks, museums, beaches, and restaurants. Our goal on this trip was to create 3 ads, that I will get more into depth about later on, and create a iBook about our adventures.

We left seycove at 6:30 on the school bus. We crossed border, had a food stop, driving more, food stop, driving more, driving more and then ended up at our campsite. That was the night where you unpacked and realized, this is it. Your going to have to sleep In cabins with 4 other girls for a week. The cabin element definitely made us have to get closer to each other. Also, just the whole trip made me closer with some people, and thats one of the reasons why this trip was successful for me. Before I move along, im going to say, this trip definitely taught me more than information/history (you know what I mean) things.

Our teachers did a really good job of packing our days full of stuff to do. To be honest, It feels like I learned more than I did all of grade 7.

Mrs willemse made us a book outline to fill out and make our own, for each thing we did. So, at the end of the trip we would have a iBook with all of our trip in it. I will paste a link of the book here. My Oregon book. We would go do something like go to a museum, tourist attraction like Cannon Beach or workshop, then write about it and add photos in our book. Suppose it was a page on a beach we went to. It would have a question, a space for your thoughts on it and space for pictures. The key was to take pictures of EVERYTHING, and pay attention to what we were learning. It sucked when you get to your cabin and you didn’t know an answer to a question or didn’t have a picture of it. What I did to make my book success was, read over the book page before on the bus, so I can know what I have to take pictures of and need to know info about. And if we had extra time at the place we were at, get some writing done while its fresh in your mind. The book I made is definitely something that is helpful to have, because I will never forget what we did, and it enhanced what I learned.

While we were in Vancouver, we were currently in a unit of advertising. Why I’m bringing it up is because our teachers incorporated that into our Oregon trip. We were in groups of five, Melika, Lauren, Aliva, Daniel, and me. Our task was to make 3 different ads each. A tourist attraction (Yaquinna Head Bay), Business ad (Cabella’s), and an ad on being prepared/being aware of Tsunamis. Here are my three ads. It was a pretty cool experiance for the business ad because we got to interview the manager of cabellas, and get a tour. It was definitely a little bit hard to capture a place or buisness in a ad, but I think I did pretty good. Sadly, we kinda left these ads to drown after we got back from Oregon, but thats ok I still leant valuable techniques about advertising.

A photo of Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach

Now, for the field study itself. I’m going to talk about some of my favourite things we did, places we went, and what I learned from it. First off, Cannon Beach. Wow it was so beautiful, pictures cant capture how stunning it was. Most of the trip it rained, but the one day we went to Cannon Beach, the sun came out. I didn’t learn much besides, don’t take 239 photos of the same big rock and don’t get wet sand in your rain boots.

The Lab
A Ghost Shrimp

Next, something I found a lot of fun was when we went to the Hatfield Marine Science Centre. We shrimp slurped in the pouring rain! Your probably confused. Let me explain, we went out on the muddy flats, and used a slurper machine thingy to pull shrimp out of the wet muddy sand. Me and Kai were partners and just let me say, i’m a pro at shrimp slurping (Kai not so much.) Once we all had enough shrimp we went back to the lab and did some sciencey testing stuff like how long the shrimp was, what type it was (mud or ghost), and if it had a parasite. It was really interesting. We also built a ROV’s there, which was a great time.

Two groups battling there ROV’s
American Thanksgiving

Before I talk about anymore nerdy things we did, I have to mention the very hyped up food aspect of this trip. We heard from all the older grades so much good things about the food. Besides the sad sad sad Chinese food buffet in the beginning of the trip, most of the restaurants were definitely worth the hype. Why I say mostly, is because “sizzlers” was a traumatic experience. Brown guacamole. No.

So the last thing im going to talk about is the aquarium. I’m a sucker for aquariums, there one of my favourite places to go to. We watched a otter show, seal show, tickled some sea anemones, and took pretty cool photos.

Beautiful Starfish
CoOoOooOOl photos

If I talked about everything I did I would be here for days typing so here is some pictures on some more things.

Mr. Hughes took my suggestion of going to WALLGREENS
The Astoria Collum.

To end this off, here’s a beautiful video my friends Lucas Koop made, it’s definitely worth a watch and captures the whole magic of this trip.

Oregon an amazing experience that I will never forget. I would have never seen myself traveling to oregon for a week with a group of kids and 3 teachers, and it being so fun and also learning as much as I did. Overall, I loved the whole trip and I miss it a lot!

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