The Foothills Writers Group is hosting a writing contest for Foothills County students.
This is their second annual writing contest, which began as a way for members of the Foothills Writers Group to help give back to the community.
"We thought that literacy and writing with children was so very, very important," explained the group's founder, Laurie Carmichael.
Last year, the contest was open to students from the public, Catholic, and Francophone schools in Okotoks, and 44 people participated.
This year, they have expanded the contest to include grade six students from Okotoks, Diamond Valley, and High River.
In total, 10 schools in Foothills County are participating in this writing contest.
"All the children can write on whatever topic they want. It can be fiction, non-fiction. It is a minimum of 300 words to a maximum of 1000. And the kids asked us why a maximum. And we said, because if you write us 20 pages each, it's going to take us forever to do these."
Carmichael adds that these students are going to be doing their Provincial Achievement Tests this year, which has an essay aspect, this will help the students to become prepared.
"The teachers don't need to do anything. They just have us come in for 15 minutes. We leave them a folder in the classroom with the poster on it and the teachers can collect all of the different essays in there."
Carmichael says they ask for the students to write their names on the essay, along with their parents' name and phone number so the parents can be contacted if the child wins.
As part of the contest, they will pick several winners.
Those will include the top three from each school and an overall winner.
Each of those who are picked will receive a prize, which may include Okotoks Dawgs tickets, $25 gift cards to grocery stores, Okotoks Rec Centre coupons, and more.
In order to determine the winners of this contest, they have several things there looking for.
Those include grammar, whether or not the story causes an emotional response, creativity, and legibility, because the kids can handwrite the story if they wish.
Another thing they will be keeping an eye out for during this competition is if the student used AI to create the story.
Last year, Carmichael said they had a student submit a story that was completely written by AI.
"The kids were really good. We really enjoyed them last year. We always tell them that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and we expect them to have a beginning, a middle, and an end to your story and it doesn't leave us hanging."
Once the competition is over, the Writers Group will return the stories to the kids with feedback.
The deadline to enter the competition is October 21, so there is still time to enter.
The judges for competition will meet on Halloween morning to start going through the stories to determine the winners, and they will let people know about the winners mid-November.
This is not mandatory, but if anyone wants to enter a story, head over to the Foothills Writers Group website.