Write Out is a free two-week annual celebration of writing, making, and sharing inspired by the great outdoors. It is a public invitation to get out and create supported with a series of online activities, made especially to help educators, students, and families explore national parks and other public spaces. This year’s event is STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math)-Powered and will run October 9-23, 2022. STEAM-Powered Write Out will use notebooks and journals that inspire observing, describing and annotating just like STEAM professionals do!
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How might thinking about the use of notebooks and journals outside, and being inspired by STEAM professionals and how they use these same tools, power your Write Out this October?
We can’t wait to hear from you!
Scientists use many tools to conduct and analyze their research. A field notebook is one of them. The data we collect at the Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network is from on-site, in the field visits to each of the parks within our network. This means a significant chunk of our data, including quantitative measurements and numbers and qualitative observations, are recorded by hand. A notebook is portable, customizable, and a record of how the field day went. What's fun about them is that no two are ever the same! To show you an example of what a field notebook can look like, below are notes taken by a member of our team.
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My science-teaching sixth grade colleague has been using Interactive Science Notebooks for a few years, and she has presented about it in our school district. I love that her view is that the notebook becomes the student textbook through inquiry and information and art, and that they build the text across the entire school year. She did not invent the idea of Interactive Notebooks, but it has become a crucial part of her curriculum. She gave me permission to share a version of the slideshow that she often uses in PD sessions with other teachers.
Do you have experiences with Interactive Notebooks and if so, how did you/your students use them? Could you see the concept as a possibility for the STEAM-powered Write Out coming in October?
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A number of years ago, Brian Kelley shared a folder with me of images of notebooks and journals from famous artists, scientists, writers, athletes and more. It was an intriguing look at how scribbles and margins and notes were being used. I tucked the folder away in Google Drive and sort of forgot about it.
As we began to think of how a focus on notebooks and journals might infused this year’s STEAM-powered Write Out in October, I rediscovered Brian’s amazing curated work and asked if he would allow us to share it. He did.
I am inviting Brian to join this discussion thread to talk about his inspiration for this Who Keeps A Journal Project, and how it has been used, and maybe give us some advice on how we might consider using it with students for Write Out.
Meanwhile, just enjoy Brian’s curation via video (which we created with his permission). What are your impressions here? What do you notice? What can we learn, and our students learn, by looking at notebook pages like this?
As an English teacher, I sometimes take students outdoors to learn how to read the world in addition to the word. Using many forms of media, including writing, students represent nature and the world. This video shows how I invite students to create field journals. This is a teacher teaching teachers as part of #WriteOut, a collaboration between the National Writing Project and the National Parks Service. I'd love to learn more about what teachers are doing in a similar fashion.