As part of our partnership with the National Writing Project’s Write Out 2026, we are sharing a few original resources and place-based writing activities to support student writers! You can check out our post on exploring the specific language of a place here.
Without having the language for it, I wonder how many students love social studies for the very fact that it engages their “historical imagination” — the ability to actually envision things that aren’t present right now but were present in the past (Staley 2021). Envisioning is a key reading comprehension strategy, too, and so, in that way, it’s an ultimate cross-over strategy in the humanities. Creating mental images helps students picture the texts they are reading and the history they are studying. In both cases, deeper understanding and engagement are the result.
When we take students outside to write, we can ignite engagement and deepen their understanding of place and community by activating their historical imagination.
In celebration of Write Out 2026, here is a resource to get your students outside and writing about place!
Ways to Use this Resource
- Use it for place-based writing during the Write Out or anytime you want to take students outside to write! Sure, the Write Out runs two weeks in October each year, but that doesn’t have to be the only time you get students outside your classroom to write! Pull out this activity any time you want to enliven your class by getting outside to write!
- Take it on a field trip! The next time you take your students on a field trip, add on some time for outdoor writing. This works particularly well if it’s a historical field trip on which you want to engage students’ historical imaginations anyway!
- Tweak this activity and use it to envision a text. Take students on a “virtual” field trip of the setting of a whole-class read today and then use their historical imagination to envision it in the time of the text. This would work brilliantly for classics or historical fiction. For instance, take students on a virtual tour of New York City and then ask them to envision the New York City of the late 1940s to understand The Catcher in the Rye.
Want more resources? Check out the Write Out 2026 Choice Board or check out the courses on lilyPD, professional development powered by William & Mary, each of which features dozens of ready-to-use resources like the one above!
How are you using this resource in your classroom? Leave a comment!
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