Welcome to The West: How the Geography of The West Shaped Us

Welcome to the Rockies where you can see breath taking/out of this world views and learn about the rich and unique history of Canada!

Hi everyone and welcome back to my Blog! Summer break is over which means it is time for more blog posts! Today we are starting off strong with my projects from our Alberta Field Study! This was such a fun trip and just like Oregon we had a project for humanities and a project for Maker. Our driving question was How has the geography of the west shaped who we are? We answered this question by writing reflections after every place we went to and by understanding geography by making a poster and a paragraph about it. We also learned about what geography is and made posters about the five themes of geography. During the trip we went to Banff, Jasper, Golden, Revelstoke, and some other places. We went on many hikes and so the unique lakes like Lake Louise and Lake Minewanka. 

About the Trip

The Alberta trip was a incredible and breathtaking experience that I will never forget. From the turquoise lakes to the tops of mountains after a two hour hike up hill. We visited historically significant places such as The Last Spike where as the name suggests is where the last spike for the Canadian Pacific Railway was hammered in. We also went to Cave and Basin which is where they discovered hot springs that led too the first ever national park! We also went to spiral tunnels which was really cool because we got there just in time to see the train go through them. Lastly we went to Rogers Pass and we got to learn about all of the struggles they had when trying to use rogers pass. All of the historically significant places we went too all relate to geography because they show one of the five themes of geography mostly human environment interaction because they shaped a country and changed/adapted the environment. 

What is Geography? The Five Themes of Geography

In order to answer the question “How has the geography of the west shaped who we are today” we had to learn about geography and the five themes geography. My definition of geography In my words geography is the physical appearance or landscape of the earth. When we talk about geography we are often describing a place or example if I’m talking about the geography of Germany I would say that is very flat with lots of forest and some rolling hills. There are five themes of geography location, place, human environment interaction, movement, and region. These are all ways to describe the geography of a place.

My Book: How the West Shaped Us

This is my book that has my answer to the driving question and all of my reflections, videos, and general work we had to do for this trip/project. This was super fun to make and I had a lot of fun on the trip. The only thing that I would have done differently for the book would be too plan out work periods at the end of the day where I could spend 20-30 minutes writing my reflection. 

Conclusion 

Our trip in Alberta was so surreal and an incredible experience I will never forget. I learnt so much about the history of Canada and how the geography of the places we were in impacted what happened and the story’s. Like Cave and Basin for example when they were searching for gold they found the hot springs and because of that they made a hotel and because of that people would swim in the hot springs and because it was such a special thing they made a National Park. I even got to learn about places like Chrigalliche where the last spike was driven and then I got to GO to Chrigalliche, same with rogers pass! 

Thank you so so much for reading my blog and I hope you have a great day or night! If you want to learn all about the maker project we did in Alberta and want to see some of the photos and videos I took you can visit my previous post here! If you would like to follow along on my PLP journey or want more content you can visit my YouTube channel!

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