Heritage Park Grade 5 Field Trip

Today was Grade 5 C and D classes’ field trip to Heritage Park.  Normally I would’ve been on a BCC ladies’ ride, but as of Friday they were short of volunteers at school.  Given the way I’ve been feeling the last couple of days, I couldn’t have gone very far on a ride.  I nearly didn’t make it to the field trip.

Aside from the ESRI Calgary Christmas party last year, I’d never been to Heritage Park. This was my big chance to go. I was assigned a troupe of six kids: Ian, Tyler, Maverick, Reagan, Amilia, and Mahmood.  We left TMC at 9 on a school bus and arrived at Heritage Park at around 9.40. We were split into 4 colours. The Blues and Greens went together – we were Blue.

Our first stop was the Wetlands Tour.  The kids took turns lugging a huge pail of water down (and back) from the wetlands in pairs to get the idea of what kids had to do as part of their daily chores during the pioneer days. Once we were there, we broke into our troupes and were given a net, a bowl, a spoon, a bucket, a reference card, and a bug examiner. We went down to one of the wetland ponds and began scooping out water and critters living in it so we could find examples from the bug reference card. We went through 5 different stations around the pond to see if/how the catches were different. We managed to see red mites, a snail, a leech, water fleas, backswimmers, water boatmen, fishing spiders, and damselfly nymphs. There were also a lot of rewind blackbirds and their mates.  We even saw the females building nests among the bullrushes.

Then we walked back up to the main area and had lunch on the grass. The second stop of the tour was self-guided.  We had a map and we wandered around looking at stores, homes, the schoolhouse, the dentist, etc.  One of my gang was fascinated by the schoolhouse.  She would’ve sat at the tiny desks all day listening to the presentation. We, of course, went to the candy store. It’s one of the biggest draws on site. We tried to ride the train, but it didn’t stop at our stop.

It was a sunny day and not too warm.  We all got back together and climbed back on the bus at 2.30.  We arrived back at TMC at 3.00.