Field Trip to Fort Whyte

Today we had a great day at Fort Whyte.  In the morning, our session was on Weather.  We made a cloud in a bottle by pouring hot water into an empty pop bottle, lighting a match and putting it in, then closing the bottle up.  When we squeezed the bottle and then let go, it made a cloud - magic.  We found out that the raindrops needed dust particles to form (Liesl).  We got to use some real weather instruments and take some measurements ourselves.  Michael learned that our atmosphere is becoming filled with greenhouse gasses.  Our Ozone layer is becoming thinner, so more ultraviolet rays are getting in.  After we ate lunch everyone enjoyed the opportunity to touch the animals in the touch museum.  Then we had a session on People of the Prairies.  It was neat to see a house with grass growing out of the roof (Brady).  Tom really liked the coyote poop.  They knew it was coyote/predator because it had hair in it.  We went into a tipi and learned some things about the rituals of tipis such as entering clockwise and that tipi's face the East.  Sadly both groups had trouble counting the 13 poles that are used to construct a tipi.  The thirteen poles represented the thirteen full moons that occur over a year (Michael).  I think everyone's favourite part was the throwing of an atlatl.  Mr German threw it so far that they had to look really far for his spear! (Tom).  We saw a post that showed us just how tall a bison can grow (Matthew).  We learned that sometimes the Aboriginals used a corral to help them catch the bison (Tom).  There was such a lot to see there, we didn't get to see everything.  We had a great adventure.