99%

Only four more students need to win NaNo! (Plus me).  We are at 99% of our word goal! Some students who've already won are continuing to write since they aren't finished with their stories.  The good news is that the NaNo site will stay up and running all year so they can keep typing on there.

A few who finished wanted to start editing right away (and adding pictures).  The YWP site has a place where you can download a copy of your novel, but it's in a .pdf format so it's not editable.  We started by copying and pasting everything from the .pdf, but the formatting transferred weird, resulting in a lot of work deleting extra spaces, etc. So now I'm having them copy and paste each chapter individually into a Word document. Way easier than it sounds.

I was going to have them wait until January to edit their stories, but they're still excited about them, so maybe I won't wait.  Maybe we'll take a week off and then I'll show them some tools in Microsoft Word to edit.  They're already collecting pictures to use for their book covers.  The site I mentioned in an earlier post has cover-making capabilities, but I checked it out today and it seems more complicated than CreateSpace (the site NaNo used to use).  I read some of the forums for educators on the YWP site and other teachers said they're still using CreateSpace because it wasn't that expensive.  So I took a look at it again, and it turns out if the books are in black and white (aside from the cover), the prices are comparable to The Book Patch.  My new plan is to use CreateSpace and have my kiddos create covers for their books through the site.  That way they can have a say in what their covers look like (plus it's less work for me!).