Gerhard E. Dekker
Regenerative Education Center

Families with children aged 3 to 6 are welcomed to join us for child led, nature based play, stories, crafting with natural materials, and seasonal fun at beautiful Grunthal Centennial Park on Wednesday, November 26th from 10 am to 12 pm! Registration is required, click below!~ Inquiries are always welcome via email to info@gerhardcenter.org

Register here for Forest and Nature School in Southeastern Manitoba!

Meet us at the trailhead on Highway 12 to explore this beautiful riparian area tucked away at the edge of Steinbach, have a fun day with community, and do some good for the area at the same time! Cleaning supplies and snacks provided.

We welcome community members of all ages to our Forest and Nature School open house, for a nature walk, art activities, storytelling and free play on the land, this Saturday, August 30th at the Weston Family Tallgrass Prairie Interpretive Centre, from 10 am to 12 pm. https://maps.app.goo.gl/7voXDdECRnTbe9os6 This is a great opportunity to see what Forest School is all about, meet our facilitators, and get to know the land at one of the sites where Forest School happens! We will have art materials, tools, books, and space to support open ended play and learning on and with the land. We look forward to meeting more of the community there! Our Forest School program has been made possible thanks to the Manitoba Government’s From the Ground Up grant, Healthy, Safe, Connected Children and Youth Stream

Registration is open now for this free program! Bring your little ones for nature-based learning and fun activities like nature walks, critter dipping, arts and crafts, puppetry and storytelling! We will explore nature through fun activities, with time for free play with other little ones on the land. This program is free to attend thanks to a grant from Steinbach Credit Union.

Our 2o25 2o26 Forest and Nature School Registration is open July 22. If the program is fully registered, you will be added to our waitlist and notified when spaces open up.

Forest School runs twice weekly, one program at La Broquerie and the other in Stuartburn MB. Supported by attuned Forest School Practitioners, the kids develop diverse skills including social/emotional learning, natural literacy, physical literacy, buschraft skills, artistic skills and creativity. We play theatre games, sing songs, work with wood, build forts, play in the mud and more! Pro-rated registration for the rest of the Spring session is available.

Our Spring Forest and Nature School Registration is open from March 31 until April 20, 2025. If the program is fully registered, you will be added to our waitlist and notified when spaces open up, and also given the option to register for our Fall session as soon as registration opens again.

We will be holding our fourth and final Art in the Woods with Friends Friday, February 28th, from 1 - 3pm. The weather is looking nice and we are looking forward to getting together! Our theme this time is Fire - Iskotew 🔥 🙌 Grunthal Park is great for sledding, so bring your sleds! We will have a fire going, bannock dough to cook over the fire, and a lantern-making craft that's possible to do with mittens on :) It's also possible the snow will be a good consistency for sculptures! ☃️

The Gerhard E. Dekker Regenerative Education Center is delighted to present "Art in the Woods with Friends," an intergenerational art and nature program designed for folks in the community to share beautiful days together outdoors and express our creativity in an enriching social environment.

Thank you for your interest in Walks in the Woods with Friends! We are excited to share experiential, learner-centered and nature based programming with you!

We're very sorry to announce this event has been postponed as a result of a strike of Educational Assistants in the Hanover School District which arose suddenly just before the event was to take place and made it impossible to move forward as scheduled, as the school could not make an exception from the cancelation of extracurricular activities for our event. We will inform you when it has been rescheduled! The team at GED-REC is delighted to invite you to attend a very special upcoming event: 'Wilfred Buck's Portable Planetarium - Indigenous Star Stories,' on Wednesday, November 1st at the Green Valley Middle School in Grunthal Manitoba!

Registration for this month's walk is now full! See you next month!

Join us for a beautiful series of free summer evening hikes where we will explore the changes of the prairie over the course of the seasons (spring, mid-summer, and early fall) with experienced Botanist and Author, Laura Reeves! Space is limited to 15 participants per hike group (30 per day), so be sure to register soon. August's hike has been moved to one walk on Thursday, September 21. Register here: https://forms.gle/zGcrtGHTRrL8AjB86

Do you or any youth in your family enjoy crafting, baking, make preserves or grow flowers or vegetables? Would you like to try your hand at selling at a market in a supportive environment? On June 24th at the 31 North Market near Kleefeld Manitoba, GED-REC invites participants of all ages to join us in a co-operative market table!.

Join us for this online workshop to learn Indigenous teachings about plants and gardening methods with expert gardener, Audrey Logan. We will learn a lot of techniques for getting the most out of our gardens, including seed stratification, fall planting, no-till methods, gardening with the cycles of the Moon, and Seven Sisters companion planting, which honours the many ways that the Seven Sisters plants (including the classic trio: corns, beans, and squash) can benefit one another and encourage a flourishing, low-maintenance garden and a sustainable food source for your family, when planted together in particular ways. This online workshop will be recorded for future watching and made available on our website. Participants who are interested in learning with Audrey are encouraged to attend live, as you will have the chance to ask questions and really absorb the teachings. Click below to register! We will also be hosting an in-person workshop with Audrey in the future. Stay tuned!

Buy a rain barrel for your garden and support nature and land based education and community building initiatives! Each barrel gets GED-REC $10 and comes with a spigot, mosquito/leaf catching screen, overflow adaptor and overflow hose! You can also purchase accessories for an existing rain barrel. Order your rain barrel before May 6th through the 'Registration' link below, and pick up your barrel and/or accessories on May 16th between 5pm and 8pm at Grande Pointe Park. Please share this event with family and friends! Thank you for your support!

Join us for a family night out! We are excited to invite the GED-REC community to the official book launch of Everyone Loves Trallala - The story of a little hempseed's journey on the farm and of friendship! The event will be held at Di Reggae Grill, a Caribbean Restaurant, with a reading at 5:30pm and supper buffet served at 6pm, followed by music, with open jamming and dancing!!

Our next Walk in the Woods with Friends is April 26th at 2:30pm, a beautiful afternoon walk on the Crow Wing Trail to the Senkiw swinging bridge. We will have the option of two approaches to the bridge: a shorter 5-10 minute walk for younger children and those with more limited mobility or who like a slower pace, and a longer, 25 minute walk as well from the other side of the river. We will all meet in the middle to play games, appreciate the changing seasons on the river, and meet new friends. Please note that there is a steep drop/cliff, and fast moving water near the bridge and picnic area. Be sure to keep a close eye on young children! Click below to register for this event.

Join Anndrea Hermann in this free online workshop to orient yourself to Google Drive, a platform GED-REC uses a lot in our organizing! Maybe you're interested in joining the GEDREC team and would enjoy an orientation to this platform, or you're doing community organizing in another capacity and would like to bring in more efficiency and congruity to your team, or wanting to gain more skills for your career, this is a powerful platform for organizing and a great thing to learn!

This month's walk is at the Cedar Bog Trail in Birds Hill Park, a trail that is very friendly for winter walking! Please see below for more information. Please note that due to weather, we have changed the date for this event from February 22 to the following Wednesday, March 1st.

We've arranged a special discount for GEDREC participants to join us for an afternoon of bowling and community building! $17/person gets you two hours of bowling, shoe and ball rental, and fun with other kids and families. Please visit the registration link for more details and to sign up! See you there!!

Registration for this event is now closed. Please sign up for our newsletter for further information about upcoming events: https://forms.gle/xs2sMU6zs83cNvQLA

Thanks to all our participants, volunteers and organizers! We had a wonderful summer together in the garden and playing in nature :)