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In the pandemic summer of 2020, just weeks before they entered grades K-7, some 20 children worked in small groups outside and by remote in Outdoor Book Camp with mentors to write, illustrate, design, and edit A Children's History of Grand Marais, Minnesota: Ice Cream & Fish.

Outdoor Book Camp took place on the porches, lawns, playgrounds, rocks, shallows, and shoreline of Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Minnesota — an outside classroom that embodies the spirit of our county's early Norwegian culture, friluftsliv – which translates to "free air living". We embrace friluftsliv to ensure we always create in coronavirus-safe spaces with lots of fresh air, ample room for children to separate from each other — and play! — while being in proximity to collaborate on a book. 

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Happy and connected — that’s a major goal of Outdoor Book Camp. We also offer creative purpose and achievement. We aim to preserve for children that familiar sense of outdoors summer wonder and release by providing them with healthy, creative, active summer experiences of positive and purposeful socialization through peer interactions — all outside. Friluftsliv!

Outdoor Book Camp is a successful creative inquiry-based learning prototype involving four children in grades 5-7, and 15 children in grades K-4. Given Cook County’s Norwegian heritage, Outdoor Book Camp in Grand Marais is a perfect fit for us because it embodies the Norwegian cultural concept of friluftsliv — free air life. Join us in 2021! Details to come!
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Preview our book,
​Ice Cream & Fish! Read the Rave Review!

DONATE to OUTDOOR BOOK CAMP
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To see the whole book,
support children creating books with Minnesota Children’s Press
by buying a copy or three!

Contact [email protected]
or check the Donate page.

How We Did It

Our method: We researched our stories by conducting outdoor primary source interviews with community members Gordon and Joyce Lindquist, and by visiting the Cook County History Museum.

We also learned (and did!) the four steps of making a book! 
Outdoor Book Camp maintained conoravirus safety standards by staying outside most of the time; wearing masks at all times; spacing out at all times; keeping sanitizing stations well stocked, as seen in the red cart on the porch, and reminding people to use them. To help us estimate a safe distance, we made 6-foot long “space noodles” from plumbing foam wrap we got at Buck’s Hardware Store, and decorated. Good for limbo and jump rope, too!

Poster Parade Project

While the older kids were making books, the younger kids were part of the Poster Parade in a collaboration with the Cook County YMCA Kids’ Camp. We organized a poster parade of "kindness signs" the children conceived in Minnesota Children’s Press’ empathy writeshop of “staffing” an injured stuffed-animal hospital. Next, we painted the feelings and sayings discovered in our empathy writeshop of healing the stuffed animals. Then we marched our large printed posters over to our local Care Center. Showing residents our signs through their windows kept everyone safe from contagion, and made us all feel happy and connected!


 Questions? Please call, email, or write us a paper letter. We have hardly any social media; it's bad for your imagination and sense of self.

The occasional  Instagram is as far as we go. Even that is iffy. Check out the compelling 2021 FaceBook (now called Meta) Whistleblower Frances Haugen testimony before Congress about FB's  "moral bankruptcy"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/05/frances-haugen-whistleblower-moral-bankruptcy-facebook. Read or listen to the early revelations in the Wall Street Journal's investigative series, Facebook Files here https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Drop social media. Go outside.

Or, join our Comma Club and learn how to make writing implements and use semicolons and be a good person communicating  kindly and effectively through paper  letters.

NEW in 2023-2025! 
​Our outdoor Letteracy Deck has been generously funded by the Grand Marais Lions Club, 1st and 2nd Thrift Store,  the Iron Range Resources & Rehabilitation Board, extending the success begun in 2023 by the Blandin Foundation of Grand Rapids, Minnesota!

You've mailed more than 7,000 cards and letters-for free, whee!--from Grand Marais!


In that writing spirit, feel free to write to us at : Minnesota Children's Press
P.O. Box 301
Grand Marais, Minnesota USA 55604

©Minnesota Children's Press 2019-2025. All Rights Reserved.


Hours

M-F: All of 'em

Telephone

+1 218-ThreeEightSeven_FIVEsixSIXsix

Email

anneATminnchildpressDOTorg
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