Have you ever wanted to explore the beautiful towering Rocky Mountains, see and walk on the snowy, shining Columbia Ice field, and go to a Ghost Town? Well than this is the blog for you. In this post, you will follow the adventures in Alberta from the grade 9 PLP field study, and takeaway the valuable insight and information we learned along the way.
The grade 9 PLP trip to Alberta was truly amazing, and entailed two main branches of study in it, which are Humanities and Maker, with Humanities being Social Studies and English combined, and Maker being the tech and electronic aspect of PLP, with things like filming, photography, and editing inside it. This post is all about the Humanities related aspect of our trip, and learning about the history of Canada, and how it has been impacted and shaped by our geography and natural barriers, needing us to create things like Roger’s Pass. Which is a system of tunnels terraformed through a valley in the Rockies so we could build the Canadian Pacific Railroad through the Perilous and snowy mountains.
To break our learning down further, we identify “Geography” as the five themes of geography, which define different aspects of how geography interacts with us and the earth. These five “themes” of geography, are Location, Human-Environment Interaction, Place, Region and Movement. Then as part of our project, when we went a particular Location, you would have to take a photo of an aspect of it and identify it as one of the five themes, being careful to take into account of how it is both historically significant, and how it represents how the geography of the West impacts how we live today. This was the first part of the main project for Humanities in Alberta, which was called the multi-touch book, and included 9 main locations, with one or two photos on each one connecting to one or more of the five themes of geography.
First, we put our top photos that most deeply represented each of the five themes of geography into a graphic poster in an app called Comic Life, and is a comic. Below is the poster.
Then we went on to put this in our digital book, called the Multi-Touch book, and then do all of the particular 9 main locations after. This book was beneficial for getting to understand and learn from the areas we went at at a deeper level, almost from the perspective of someone who created or founded the area, and understand how the area might have affected the West in its early days of colonization. This project was one I had been exited to do because I have always been interested in Canadian history, and this project allowed me to take a much deeper dive into the societal, social, economical and political progression of Canada and more specifically Western Canada.
Before you see the book, I want to break down some of the information that will be in there. First of all, the text you see on the front page beneath the title is my thesis, answering the driving question for this project, How Has The Geography of The West Shaped Who We Are? Before you see my actual thesis, ask yourself, how do you think where we live, and all of its natural landscape, resources and beauty has effected you? Now I will show you the Multi-Touch digital book, highlighting all that we did on the trip, and most of the places we went and what we ultimately took away from them.
Now that you have seen the book, does it make you want to go to Alberta, or do you find yourself feeling more curious about our Canadian history and how we got to where we are now? This is what I hoped to have done for you. Thanks For Reading!
