Only two days left in November... my class is 94% to our goal of 87,500 words written (we're at 82,719 as of now). I have only 3,000 words to go on my own NaNo story; I hope to finish the story by tomorrow night. So far, five of my ten students have reached their goals and won! Some of the winners are still writing too! I was pleasantly surprised at how many wrote over Thanksgiving break. The boy who accidentally/on purpose deleted his story was one of the people who wrote, and he made his goal!!! Here's what he posted in our online message board; it's too sweet not to share. "made it to my word goal i'm happy i thought i would never get it but the main thing is never give up" Teacher win!
One sad thing is that NaNo is not offering a free hard copy of each winner's story. In the past they've given out codes and I've published my kiddos' books for them. Now they're not, but I promised my kids that I'd publish their books for them. I did a quick online search after school for cheap, self-publishing sites and I did find one that seems relatively inexpensive... The Book Patch, $2.88 per 60pg book. That makes me feel much better about the project. I think that will be my Christmas present to my students this year, a coupon for a printed version of their books.
A former student stopped in today after school to get help on a writing assignment. She has to write a gothic/creepy/horror story for her American Literature class and she wanted help outlining it. The teacher had given her what I like to call a "plot roller coaster" worksheet with spaces for the exposition, rising action, climax, etc. Her idea was that a nurse in a hospital is murdering people. It took about an hour, but now she has an outline plus some detailed character notes. The janitor is going to discover her "crime room" and then disappears, never to be found again... dun, dun, dun. I'm glad I don't have to write that story!
We started writing letters to our Slovakian pen pals today. I'm a little worried I'm overwhelming my students with letter writing. But they got pretty excited about these letters, so I hope that excitement keeps up. I was spurred into action by an email I saw this morning from one of the Slovakian teachers. She wanted to know if I'd seen her previous email. Oops, I thought I'd responded to that one... she sent it almost two weeks ago... Since we were on Thanksgiving break, I didn't see the email asking if I'd gotten the first email for a few days. Sigh. But now I've responded so we should be all right.
I always feel like I'm cheating a little at the pen pal thing. My kids are fluent in English, so they can just whip out a letter in a few days, or even a day. Our pen pals have been working on their letters all month! And putting a ton of time and effort into them.
A bunch of my book orders came in today. Yay new books! I have to be careful not to hog them all. Lots of them are good read-aloud picture books, so I want to keep them and do them one by one. But then I get books from the library, so we read those first and the bought books stay tucked away on the shelf. I should let my students enjoy the books instead of hogging them on the shelves! Oh well, I guess it's a good incentive for me to keep my act together on using read-alouds to teach skills.
Time for me to wrap up and get out of here. My plan for tonight: run errands, pick up some more NaNo prizes, and get home and write!
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