Has a trip even felt like it lasted forever, but when it ended you would 100% do it again. That’s what Alberta felt like for me, and it was my grade 9 field study. Once again like Oregon we had to make a book that documented our journey. There was a Maker part of the book, and a Humanities part. For this post I will be focusing on the Humanities side of it. If you want to see the Maker part you can go look at that post.

 

What Was The Project?

The project for Alberta was focusing on the geography effecting us in our everyday lives. This led to amazing hikes, meeting interesting people(who were also amazing), and to see new animals. The main product was the book, but we also did smaller projects to present our work.

 

Book

The book was the biggest product for the Humanities side, and probably for Maker too. It was a collection of videos, explanations of where and what we did, and other work we did. It had us work on presentation skills through text. You can kind of think of it as a journal of the trip.

Comic Life

This was a smaller part of the book that involved the 5 themes of geography. The main idea was to make a poster that can display the 5 themes along with a one word explanation of a photo that goes with the theme.

Competency

There were two big competencies of Humanities, Processing and Communicating. To make this easier I’m going to split them up with examples of how I showcased that competency through my work.

Processing: The big idea for this competency is being able to understand concepts, reflect, and think creatively and critically. Simply put it is how you think to understand situations and questions better, along with answering them. The best example of this would be the writing part of my book where I was able to put information about what, and where we went. I also received lots of critique for my book that I was able to reflect on, then make the needed changes.

Communicating: The book once again is an amazing example of communicating. The whole point of the book was to communicate with a public audience, which is what it’s doing when it’s on a blog for anyone to see. This goes great into the other big system of communicating with a public audience, and that being with blog post along with the Maker one. Through these systems of communicating I have been able to present my work to a wide audience. There is one other way I was able to communicate was through normal conversation with people in Alberta. While we were on the trip we did interviews for one of the Maker projects, but that wasn’t the only time we talked to people. I was talking to people and picking up information throughout the whole trip.

Conclusion

The learning for Humanities during this project was done a lot through either giving others information, or receiving it from them. It was a more social, and public based project with the  competencies reflecting that. Overall I was able to improve in both competencies, and will continue to improve in them throughout highschool.