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Write Out, Manitoba! is a three-week event in October to celebrate writing across the province. Write Out, Manitoba! encourages educators, students, families, and communities to get outdoors and write, make, create, and share. Designed with and for educators,
Write Out, Manitoba! is for everyone! From October 12 - October 28, we invite you to connect, write, and learn in daily writing activities for teachers, students, and families. You can use the Calendar below for ideas or create your own. The goal is to connect and learn through place-based writing.
Write Out, Manitoba! is inspired by, and coordinated with, the National Writing Project’s National Day on Writing and Write Out events.
Share your Write Out, Manitoba! ideas and writing with us! Throughout the month, show us how you’ve participated in Write Out, Manitoba! Add the writing invitations you’ve designed and share your writing with us by using the hashtag #WriteOutManitoba.
As you prepare for three weeks (or a day! or a week!) of walking and spending time in the outdoors with your students, you may want to consider the following:
As with guardians and administrators, you’ll want tocommunicate with your students about the purpose of Write Out, Manitoba!As Judson (2018) explains,
A thoughtful and engaging introduction is important as students need to be prepared to “work” hard on these walks—the walks are not non-instructional time but will require much effort on their part. It is likely (especially with older students) that you will need to “un-do” the belief that outside time in non-instructional time.(p. 16)
Ultimately, the goal of Write Out, Manitoba! is to evoke a sense of wonder in students and strengthen their familiarity and connections to Place. As Judson (2018) writes,
Place, here, refers to an emotional connection to some aspect of the wildness in the world that surrounds them. Sense of place involves a sense of community. Sense of place is what can change how our students understand the world of which they are part—it can help them re-imagine their relationship with the natural and cultural communities they live in. (p. 8)
When we take students outdoors and built their connections to Place, “their learning can take on an added dimension” (p. 16) as they “tap into the richness of the world around them” (Judson, 2018, p. 17). Importantly, before taking your students outdoors, set the tone and ensure students understand the purpose of spending time outside of the classroom.
The “actual” writing can take place at any time—before, during, or after your time outdoors. For instance, you may have students craft writing about the school yard, then ask them to go outside and take note of the details they may have forgotten, or you may have students spend time sitting in the grass, writing down everything they experience through their senses. Alternatively, students may go on a walk, then return to the classroom to reflect on their experiences during the walk, charting details about what they noticed, thought, and wondered, including any memories, feelings, connections, and questions that arose.
If students are writing while outside, it may be helpful to have clipboards, tarps, or other materials that would make the task easier.
Additionally, writing can take many forms. Beyond specific genres (e.g., haikus and letters), writing may look like a drawing, a map, or a photograph.
Download the following attachment for a PDF containing a calendar with an overview of the month's writing prompts, as well as more detailed breakdown of each day's suggested activity: Write Out, Manitoba! Calendar
The Walking Curriculum is an innovative interdisciplinary resource for educators K-12 who want to take student learning outside school walls. Walking Curriculum activities can be used in any context to develop students’ Sense of Place and to enrich their understanding of curricular topics. Based on principles of Imaginative Ecological Education, the 60 easy-to-use walking-focused activities in this resource are designed to engage students’ emotions and imaginations with their local natural and cultural communities, to broaden their awareness of the particularities of Place, and to evoke their sense of wonder in learning.
Teachers in urban, sub-urban, and even in rural areas, often have little imagination-focused curricular resources that can develop students’ sense of ecological understanding and contribute to their understanding of the mandated curriculum. This resource can help to fill that gap. Through walking we can enrich our students’ sense-making abilities, we can enhance their very being and, as we go, we can seed with meaning the contexts in which they spend so many hours learning
Imaginative Ecological Education (#IEE) blends imagination-focused teaching with Place-based teaching. The overall aim of the IEE approach is to provide powerful learning opportunities that also cultivate students’ understanding of the connectedness of all life and their sense of care and concern for the Earth. To support this goal, imaginative and ecologically shaped teaching activities (check out these IEE Teaching Tips) engage the heart with knowledge, the body in learning, and learning in place
Write Out is a free two-week celebration of writing, making, and sharing inspired by the great outdoors. It is a public invitation to get out and create that is supported with a series of online activities, made especially for educators, students, and families, to explore national parks and other public spaces. The goal is to connect and learn through place-based writing and sharing using the common hashtag #writeout.
This year’s Write Out is STEAM-Powered (STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) and will run October 9-23, 2022. To support this theme, Write Out will be organized around the use of notebooks and journals that inspire observing, describing and annotating just like STEAM professionals do!
National Writing Project's Write Out 2022
Our Elders relay how we come into our bodies and our awareness in order to learn. Life is a journey of our spirits that are in a relationship with Creator. The Elders likened birth to an occurrence when the spirit joins with the physical body to become body, mind, emotions, and also spirit. Provided with a purpose and gifts for the spirit from Creator, the spirit journey is directed toward the discovery of these gifts and the fulfillment of that purpose. Families, communities, places, and ceremonies nurture the spirit in informal learning environments and in more formal environments, where it is expected that schools will validate the existing knowledge base of the students and provide an environment, experiences, and knowledge, where students may work toward fulfillment of their gifts and purposes in accordance with the laws of Creator, passed down through the collective stories, traditions, customs, and identities of Aboriginal peoples.1Aboriginal families and communities have a special role in this journey – to foster a strong collective identity and provide wisdom for their children and youth as they engage in lifelong learning. Through our families, peers, and communities, we come to learn about ourselves through our ecologies, land, and environments. Our Elders and families share their knowledge of place in their daily personal and communal adventures on the land, in traditional tales, timed with the seasons, and in the context of everyday life.We come to know ourselves in place, and by its depth of beauty, abundance, and gifts, we learn to respect and honour that place. All Indigenous peoples have, then, a land base and ecology from which they have learned, and it is there that they honour the spirit of that land in ceremonies, traditions, prayers, customs, and beliefs. These, then, are the core foundations of Indigenous knowledge, learned within a language and culture.
You can read Battiste's article in Education Canada here.
The Walking: Attuning to an Earthly Curriculum issue of Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies was published in 2021 and includes the following articles:
