Esther’s Rockies Field Study Journal

Movement is almost exactly what it sounds like. It defines how people, goods, and ideas are moved from place to place. For example, to move people and goods, you could use trains, cars, airplanes, etc. To move ideas you could use letters, emails, texts, books, movies, or even in person conversation. I chose to use a picture I took of a train model that is transporting people and goods. 

Next is place. So place takes part in geography as the characteristics of a location, whether it is absolute or relative. A place can have physical characteristics such as landforms (lakes, mountains, etc), flora (plants, animals, etc), climate (weather, temperature, etc), and resources (minerals, etc). It can also have human/cultural characteristics such as everyday life (religions, food, holidays, etc), land use (housing, economic activities), and political ideologies (types of governments). For my representation of place, I chose landforms, shown as a picture I took of me and my friends next to the Canadian flag on the Athabaskan Glacier

The 5 themes of geography are basically like the factors that make up geography. But what are the 5 themes? Well, there is Location, Place, Human-Environment Interaction, Movement, and Region. Each theme has their own roles to play in geography and we got to dig deep into each one with a guided note taking sheet that you can see in the <a href="bookcreator://page/f_t8TJwtRf612MF2p9MZCQ">next page</a>. After that, we had to make a comic strip of the 5 themes with photos we took from our trip to Alberta to show that we fully understood this topic. The requirement for the comic strip was our own photo that we took from our trip that represented each theme, and two text blocks describing that theme. My comic strip can be found <a href="bookcreator://page/Cx1p1IN5TLGdfiZqedYARg">here</a>.

1. What is geography through one or more of the Five Themes? 

2. What made and makes the West by how this photograph represents the physical environment influencing the nature of political, social, and economics in the West. 

3. Your own connection and interpretation of the place the photo represents

Finally, we have gotten to human environmental interaction. There are three ways to categorize this interaction. First is adaptation. People adapt to the environment, like how we adapted to the countries we moved to and inhabit. For example, we have to adapt to the plants, and climate, and weather. Next is modification. People modify the environment to make it more convenient or safer for them to live. For example, we cut down forests to make space for our cities, and we modified natural habitats and turned them into parks. Last but not least, we depend on the environment to get what we need to survive. We cut down trees to use it to build things, and we take food from the environment to live off of. I chose to show the modification part of the human environmental interaction, which is shown as a picture of rock pillars that used to support railroads built in 1885. 

Hi! My name is Esther, and I am a Grade 9 PLP student. I like food, the color pink, and my favorite subject at school is Math. I really had a good learning experience throughout this journey, and I had a lot of fun as well, hanging out with my friends. I look forward to doing it again next year with a different project and a different location, and I hope that I have just as much fun in the future as I did throughout the last week. Thank you for reading this journal and if you want to know even more about me, make sure to check out <a href="http://www.blog44.ca/esthers/">my blog!</a>

This will be your cover. It should include a graphic(s),  your name, and a title relating to the Answering to the Driving Question 

So, what is location? Well, location is part of geography because it tells you the exact spot, or sometimes a description of the spot  in geography. An absolute location is when a location is exact, for example, a house address, a zip code, the coordinates of a cafe, etc. A relative location on the other hand, is less exact. You could describe the place, for example a cafe across from a pharmacy, or a high school next to a park. This is how we described locations and made it a part of our project. For my location example, I put a picture of a sign that show the absolute location of Craigallechie, the last spike.

Moving on to region. There are three ways to determine a region. Formal, which means it was defined by governments or administrations for example countries, states, and cities. Functional, which means it was defined by a function such as newspapers service area, or cellphone coverage area. Vernacular, which means the region was defined by similar characteristics like corn land, Rocky Mountains, or deep cove, Chinatown, and mainland. For my region representation, I chose the photo of a highway sign to sun peaks jasper as my formal region.

3. Your own connection and interpretation of the place the photo represents

1. <a href="bookcreator://page/qrX-U8IASaiyQXeMBRLC8g">What is Geography?</a>

7. <a href="bookcreator://page/SzeCbDIhSDypSLzZRd4d_Q">Lake Minnewanka</a>

2. <a href="bookcreator://page/DBqTX_XcQDq_4OsEVD8nQQ">The 5 Themes</a>

8. <a href="bookcreator://page/IaRZHtKyRhauRryRacXmKQ">Columbia Icefield</a>

3. <a href="bookcreator://page/wf6swShGQLa7RJSwnh-NuA">What Made and Makes the West?</a>

9. <a href="bookcreator://page/vKqsF5hAQWyfppoPWsSqgA">Moraine Lake</a>

4. <a href="bookcreator://page/i3xkbbD0TW6c6ymXiAsVxA">The Last Spike</a>

10. <a href="bookcreator://page/Gm-xgYKfTu2JvmuqHFrYsg">Golden Skybridge</a>

5. <a href="bookcreator://page/wN9_aYp0Q82UgGo9VI_8gQ">Roger’s Pass</a>

11. <a href="bookcreator://page/p1yJ54bwSpmBY750VXED7A">Revelstoke Railway Museum</a>

6. <a href="bookcreator://page/jWCSTigfQ-qTdtkxz2gzxA">Cave and Basin</a>

12. <a href="bookcreator://page/mGcw1qUOTNCFynzmmD1XtQ">Maker Videos</a>

13. <a href="bookcreator://page/OssDMeKnS3GD26CWf98pVw">About the Author</a>

The geography part and every page in this book before this one was all part of the humanities project, But this page will be all about our Maker project that we were also working on in Alberta. For Maker, our driving question is how can I tell a story with a moving image? The assignment was for us to make 4 different kinds of videos about the west or in the west. A TikTok, an Interview, a Silent Film, and an at home video. The TikTok and Silent video was more for fun and putting our videography skills in use, the at home video was more putting our video editing skills to use, and the interview video was more related to answering the humanities driving question. We filmed our Silent videos in Three Valley Gap (a.k.a Ghost Town) because it had many different buildings that we could go to as well as a village out line to use. The TikTok was filmed in any location we went to that we thought fit our individual TikToks. The interview videos were filmed wherever we could find someone who was comfortable being interviewed (tourists or staff members), which was very nerve wrecking, because we had to talk to strangers in a different province. The at home video was about what inspires me? We had to film a video talking about ourselves and introducing ourselves a little bit to the world. The video was made up of short clips that I filmed in my house and put together with a voice over reading out a script that I wrote. In the following pages, you will see all of my videos that I planned, filmed, and edited both at home and in Alberta. All of my videos can also be found in my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Esther_S-S">YouTube channel</a>.

Our driving question for this project was ‘How has the geography of the West shaped who we are?’ And to answer this question, first we had to learn about what geography was. What is Geography? Well, the dictionary definition of geography is ‘a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth.’ Since our main focus on this project is focusing on the geography of the West (specifically the Rocky Mountains of Canada), we needed to learn the 5 themes of geography to really grasp an understanding of the subject.

The second part that we needed to figure out in order to answer our driving question, was ‘What made and makes the west?’ So along with all the geographical things that we had to learn, we also researched on the history of the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad), as well as the history of the west (Alberta). The following pages will be filled with information and photos that we took on the trip that shows some of the <a href="bookcreator://page/DBqTX_XcQDq_4OsEVD8nQQ">5 themes</a>, as well relate to the question ‘what made and makes the west?’

Name

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