To kick off the school year blog posts I will be talking about our first field school of grade nine. The road trip to Calgary.

 

When I say we were going on a road to trip to Calgary I mean we were riding a bus and we would eventually end up in Calgary, not that we were going directly to Calgary . We stopped a copious amount of times on the way. On the first day of the trip we drove pretty much straight to the last spike. The last spike was an important stop for us because our whole year of humanities we are focusing on Canadian history. The last spike is the place where a CPR (Canadian pacific railway) was finished and the CPR was a large part of Canada’s beginnings. That day we also had a video challenge. After the last spike we had to go to the three valley gap and film a 5-10 minute video in one hour. Doing that is pretty much impossible and most of our groups ended up with a 3-4 minute video. This short team challenge really helped us learn better scheduling and helped us learn how to multitask. If you want to see the video here it is

Each person on the trip had chosen a place on the itinerary to make a three minute documentary on. I had chosen Calgary. Calgary was a big place so instead of doing mine on all of Calgary I did it on Beakerhead. Beakerhead is a sort of festival held every year to show off people’s scientific and artistic creations. Some of these creations were really amazing. My video was on a specific part of Beakerhead called the mars 112 project. Before our documentary project i really couldn’t edit clips into movies at all. With this project I learned so many editing skills that I feel confident I can make good videos now. My solo documentary is right here.

Another awesome place we went to is the Royal Tyrell museum of paleontology. This museum had tons of awesome fossils to look at and study. We got a tour through the badlands which are giant hills of sediments right outside of the museum. The sediments there have been compressed for millions of years. This is also where the museum finds lots of there fossils. On our tour we saw lots of interesting sandstone formations and we even found a fossilized stump.
After all of this (surprise surprise!) we had to make a quick 1 minutes video about a dinosaur in the museum we found interesting. I chose the allosaurus because it was one of the top predators of its place and time. The video is directly below.

 

Some other places we went to include a wolves sanctuary which was awesome because I got to touch a tamed wolf and see a bunch of wolves howl when everyone was howling at them. We also went to the Glenbow museum which had tons and tons of ancient artifacts from samurai swords to First Nations war armor to World War One anti-tank rifles.

 

 

In reflection this was the best PLP trip I’ve ever been on. I feel like I learned so much about such a wide range of topics, from editing and videos to the CPR to dinosaurs. I had such a good time (although I had a major lack of sleep) with my friends, good food, fun activities and great teachers that I didn’t want to leave. Ten out of ten, can’t wait for Ottawa.