It’s easy to look forward to going back to school in Winnipeg––particularly if you are booking student trips!
For the 2024-25 school year, this city’s living classrooms have added even more to their curriculums, offering an abundance of hands-on learning experiences that will see young minds blooming like the waterlilies across our wetlands (which are in fact the largest flowers in all of Manitoba!).
Whether the educator is looking for history, art, biology or anything STEM related, Assiniboine Park Zoo, Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq, FortWhyte Alive and the Manitoba Museum all provide settings you won’t find anywhere else.
When teaching tools include polar bears swimming over students’ heads, 450-million-year-old fossils and ingenious Inuit inventions that you can hold, and the ultimate scavenger-hunt-meets-escape-room experience within a gorgeous nature reserve, you must be in Winnipeg.
Here’s what’s in store for this school year.
Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG)-Qaumajuq
Downtown’s culture campus has been raved about by design, art and culture publications from around the world (including being on a TIME magazine cover!)––so just imagine what students’ reactions will be when they are learning within its snowdrift-like façade.
WAG-Qaumajuq holds the world’s largest collection of contemporary Inuit art, along with a majestic collection of works in a variety of mediums from the Renaissance to today. As a centre for learning, the facility features everything from small classrooms for hands-on art workshops, a huge Visible Vault holding thousands of sculptures from across the Arctic and Ilipvik - The Learning Steps––a 90-seat theatre that the WAG states is also, “a smart classroom expanding our distance learning programs, connecting classrooms, artists, elders, and educators locally, from North to South and worldwide.”
As part of its curriculum-based K-12 student opportunities, WAG-Qaumajuq has expanded its 2024-25 offerings with so many new programs.
At a glance, five new tours with workshops are on offer, covering everything from contemporary art, Truth and Reconciliation through art, Indigenous storytelling, Inuit innovations, and taking inspiration from real fossils to create art that truly rocks
For a combination of geology, prehistoric history and of course visual arts, the Art, Rocks and Fossils Tour and Workshop is a real gem. On it, students will see how the WAG’s building materials––that being Manitoba Tyndall Stone, which you can see on buildings across the city––are a rich source of fossils dating back to well before the dinosaurs (by hundreds of millions of years in fact). You’ll learn how this region was covered by oceans, ice and North America’s largest-ever lake across the ages; how Inuit artists have used soapstone and what soapstone is; and how Inuit storytelling is evident throughout the Visible Vault. After the tour, the workshop will focus on Inuit and modern art-making techniques as your students use real fossils and soapstone to create their own original works. Seriously, how cool is that?
For a full listing of WAG-Qaumajuq’s student opportunities, click here.
Assiniboine Park Zoo
The zoo’s Journey to Churchill is the world’s most extensive Arctic species exhibit of its kind and is home to enchanting animals like snowy owls, muskoxen, wolves, Arctic foxes and its show-stopping polar bears. While that alone is a huge sell for your students, educators love how this renowned research centre utilizes these animals to teach conservation and biology.
Its new Endangered Species & Conservation Program (grades 7-12) is sure to enthrall and educate both students and teachers alike, showcasing how the zoo is involved in helping a number of international species at risk. By touring the zoo and getting up close to animals like snow leopards (which were once found across northern Asia), grassland butterflies (which pollinate across North America) and polar bears (whose lives in the wild continue to be drastically affected by global warming), this program will cover breeding programs, population reintroduction efforts and other research projects. It will also reveal how zoos across the world are helping Save Animals from Extinction (SAFE) through various breeding programs. In this, the 90-minute tour covers content for both science and social studies classes.
All student class experiences at the zoo can also include its Animal Ambassador Program add-ons. These 15-minute bonus sessions are applicable for grades 1-12 and will see your class having hands-on contact with certain animals via their knowledgeable animal ambassadors.
Here's a full listing of educational opportunities at Assiniboine Park Zoo.
Manitoba Museum
K-12 programming at the Manitoba Museum is sure to put the wind in your students’ sails, along with seeing their imaginations blast-off across the cosmos.
When your specialized student tours, shows and workshops include experiences like boarding the 17th Century replica Nonsuch ship, getting right up to a 90-million-year-old intact pliosaur fossil in the Earth History Gallery or conducting your own electricity in the Science Gallery, students are sure to pay attention.
Amongst the Manitoba Museum’s many school programs, one new experience for this year involves the new Planetarium show Worlds of Ice. This show brings students across the cosmos to explore distant ice worlds before bringing them back down to earth in the high Arctic and belowground in Antarctica where ice research is always being conducted. To quote from the Museum, “We experience it all immersed in a kaleidoscopic igloo from which we emerge utterly dazzled by the chronicles of an icy wonderland, to which Beatrice Deer, a popular figure of Inuit culture, has lent her unique voice.”
This cool new programming combines both science, social studies and history, and is just one of countless student programs at the Museum as you can read in the above link.
FortWhyte Alive
Winnipeg’s stunning nature centre has everything from lakes that students can canoe, sail or ice fish on; to forested trails where you can go birding and learn about dendrology; to wetlands where dip-netting will reveal the marvelous microscopic world of water. Oh, and it’s also home to North America’s largest urban bison herd, which your students will of course love too.
New for 2024-25 is an outdoor experience that will have your students’ hearts and feet racing. Track & Trail combines the best elements of a scavenger hunt and an escape room, as your class becomes a team of wildlife biologists who must gather vital conservation data at FortWhyte. Available in both 45-minute and 75-minute options and during any season (including winter!), this is a great way for your class to learn on the run (literally) as the clues will help them solve a puzzle that is equal parts environmental science, conservation and outdoor ed.
As you can read on its website, it’s just one of many experiences for student groups at FortWhyte, where the outdoor curriculum can cover anything from animal identification to advanced biology for high school classes where students learn transect and quadrat sampling methods, use dichotomous keys and take water chemistry measurements.
