Hellooooo, and welcome to my blog post! Second one for the year, and first for Humanities!

About 5 weeks ago, half of the grade 9s went on a trip to Alberta! (the other half went at a different time). We went to many different places like the Sundre Museum, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Cave and Basin, The Last Spike and more! It was a great adventure and I enjoyed it all (the food was yummy too). 

Even though the trip was super fun and a great experience it was still school, so of course we had to have an end project. Throughout the trip we gathered information to answer the driving question: How has the geography of the West shaped who we are? All the information and knowledge we received went into the multi touch e-book we had to create!

We also learned about the 5 themes of geography which are movement, human environment interaction, regions, place, and location. We had to create a comic on Comic Life 3 to show the definition of these 5 themes.

(I go more into depth in the book so stay tuned)

Circling back to the driving question, we were put into groups based on what we thought shaped the west the most. So, in class we brainstormed 3 things that make up the West. The ideas were history, diversity, and economy. Then, we each had to pick a concept that we thought we could best answer the driving question with. I thought the best concept was economy and my reflections would be the strongest if I talked about the economy of the West in them.

All the people who chose economy were put into a group to compose an overall answer to the driving question. The final answer we came up with, as a group, was:

The geography of the West has shaped us by allowing us to have a thriving economy with multiple industries that have helped us settle and develop. 

For those wanting more detail about the places we explored and to understand the interrelationship between geography and economy. I think it is time to show my book…. drumrolllll 

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Tada! I think my favourite page is probably the page showing Susan, Blondie and myself wearing our hard hats that we got from the Sundre Museum as a souvenir. Those hats looked so funky and I loved that they were handmade by the older gentleman who owned the museum. They were also a reasonable price at just $5.00! (I bet I helped the economy with those 5$).

The page I think that demonstrates my strongest reflection, is probably the Last Spike page because I was most confident with my personal connection. It made me call up my grandfather and ask him questions about his experience coming to Canada as an immigrant. I learned some surprising things, like my grandmother worked in a manufacturing company when she first arrived! My curiosity was definitely peaked with this page.

The page I found the most challenging was the Sundre museum and the Pioneer Village because I don’t really remember much about so writing about it hurt my brain. I realized after the fact I didn’t take good notes, and only had a few photos. As a result, I left this page for the absolute last and to help my understanding I had to spend the most time, out of all pages, researching on this place. There may or may not have been a few tears in the process. I also greatly struggled with the personal connection; however, I was happy when I suddenly had a picture of Cougar Annie in my head. Re-reading about her helped deepen my understanding of the Pioneer days and I really like that she is a strong independent woman!

Then, after hopefully all of us completed the book we had a mini exhibition on Wednesday to show them to our parents! We had 3 different rooms for the 3 different concept and to refresh your memory they were: economy, diversity and history. If you didn’t guess it yet we were put into the room with the rest of the people who chose economy. We themed the room to be about money and we all dressed in business attire (Daniel even printed out business cards).

Here are some photos of the room!  

 

I think Gwen and I did a good job presenting and we looked pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.

It wasn’t just the books we were showing at the exhibition, we also had to create a video that would play on loop well the people walked around the rooms looking at our books. Again, they were based on the 3 topics but there was also an intro video and 2 fun videos! I got the luck of creating the fun video 2 with Jupiter, Keaton, Evangline, Kadin, Makai, and Magnus. We decided to make ours about the goofy things PLP 9 did on the trip.

Everyone had separate roles when we had to create the video, and Evangline and I had the highly important role of being the final editors! We were the ones who put all the photos and videos together and edit them all to become one amazing video. We had a lot of fun and everyone seemed to like it. Here is the final video Fun group 2 created!

In the end I always am going to reflect and I am going to focusing on the competency of.. questioning!

Questioning: I can share ideas, ask questions, and research information from a variety of sources. 

During the trip I tried to ask questions to the tour guides and experts, and if I could do it again I would have asked more. Again, my Sundre experience cemented this I only asked one question, which didn’t give me much! What I am proud of is the extra research that I did because I feel like I was able to understand more of the places and make my answers stronger. Thanks to my mom I am feeling more confident that I can reach the goal I put in my learning plan, which was: 

“I would like to work on my stamina and perseverance when researching for resources. I tend to give up on researching if it doesn’t give me an immediate answer. So I will try to dig deeper into websites and not just skim through.”

I am still struggling because I get overwhelmed with a bunch of different sources that are all telling me good information. So I need to find a way to organize the info I get so it does not just swirl in my head and keep me stalled for hours upon time.

For some places, I did not really know how I could personally connect to the place. For example, the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump took me a little bit to think of how I could connect to it personally. Thankfully, we have awesome and encouraging teachers, I asked the teacher and was told I could write how I felt when I was there! I talked a lot with my peers and we all showed each other our ideas and talked about how we could bring in different aspects of a place. Also, we sent each other pictures of the views, trips and experiences on the trip when someone didn’t have them. I appreciate not only my teachers but my peer community. Lots of good conversation and learning can happen with just us sharing our stories.

Thank you for reading! I hope you learned something about the West<3