Today the Physical Geography class took a field trip to Short Hills Park to undertake fieldwork studies to test the assumptions learned in the rivers unit of their course. Groups brainstormed hypotheses in the previous classes, and considered ways to test them. Short Hills Provincial Park was a good location, since it has an accessible meandering stream, shallow enough in parts to wade in, and with plenty of variety to the stream channel.

Some students collected water samples to study sediment load at different parts of a meandering stream. Others measured the speed of the stream by timing floating corks, others the depth, width, etc. They will compile their observations in a detailed report, and consider other hypotheses that one might study.

The weather was ideal and contributed to a successful field trip. When IB is fully implemented at Ridley, the Internal Assessment in Geography will be Field Work. This gave us a good opportunity to have a dry run (pardon the pun) and refine the process for upcoming years.

As told by Geography teacher, Mr. Park