Teachers, we know that your students walk, listen, and learn with our program, but we also know they are amazing writers too. After all, we’ve seen some pretty thoughtful and creative thank you notes come our way over the past several years. Now your students can truly shine (and maybe even share their story-building skills with a larger audience!) because we are making their Walking Classroom experience the focus of this Walktober! This year, The Walking Classroom will celebrate Walktober with a contest for your students, and it’s a writing contest! Here is your chance to have your students put pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard!) and share their Walking Classroom story.
Guidelines
- Students should use their creative writing skills to describe their favorite Walking Classroom experience.
- What was the weather like?
- Where did the walk take them?
- What podcast did they listen to?
They don’t have to stop there! Your students should feel free to go into as much detail as they like, but they should use their senses to help us know what they saw, heard, smelled, and felt in their Walking Classroom experience!
OR
- Students should use their persuasive writing skills in order to convince the “audience” of their choice (for example, a student from another school, the principal, or the president) that every classroom should be a walking classroom.
- What are some of the reasons?
- Explain each reason with supporting details.
Your students should use good organization and also provide enough vivid examples in order to make their point clear!
OR
- While we have proposed the above two prompts, we understand that you as a teacher may be working on practicing a different type of writing with your students, and we welcome you to develop your own prompt to support where you are in the curriculum. Just be sure that it is built around your students’ experience with The Walking Classroom. The possibilities are endless, and we love to be surprised by cleverly executed ideas!
Prizes
To celebrate the winners, and to show our thanks for their participation, the winning stories will be published on The Walking Classroom’s blog in November, and the three winners will receive the following prizes:
- First place – $50 Amazon gift card
- Second place – $25 Amazon gift card
- Third place – $25 Amazon gift card
Teachers of winning student entries will also receive a $50 Amazon gift card.
Rules
- Only one entry per student will be accepted in the contest.
- Entry may be handwritten, in print or cursive writing on lined white paper, or it may be typed.
- The length of the entry must be at least 50 words, but there is no maximum word limit.
- Entry must be written in prose (no poems, please!), and it should be in paragraph form.
- If there are multiple pages, students should write only on one side of the page.
- Each entry must also include the following information on the back of the final page.
- First name of student
- Name of teacher
Entries must be postmarked by Friday, October 28, 2016, and should be mailed to:
The Walking Classroom
1414 Raleigh Road, Suite 295
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
All entries will become the property of The Walking Classroom and will not be returned. Excerpts may be published on social media.
Click here to download the Walktober Writing Contest guidelines.
Happy writing!
Leave a Reply