All NaNo's Eve

The last day of October... that means tomorrow is November first, All Saints Day as well as the first day of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month!

My kiddos are super excited after all the novel plotting we've done with their characters and conflict and dialogue. One girl said she's going to set her alarm for 11:45pm so she can wake up and start writing right at midnight!!! I wonder if she'll do it for real...

I hung up our NaNo stat chart, where they can keep track of how many words they've written. Today I met with a few students who wanted to go over what their story is about (matching it up with the Plot Rollercoaster aka rising action, climax, falling action, etc.) so they know what to write tomorrow. And we also went over possible ways to start their stories. Show not tell!

Tomorrow is also a staff meeting right after school along with my meeting with our future student teacher! I broke the news in social studies today. We are studying colonial America and the possible jobs/apprenticeships they could have. To explain, I used a teacher as an example, how I had to learn from another teacher when I was back in college... which gave me the idea to say that we're having a teacher apprentice come to our classroom! It wasn't as grand a reveal as I'd been hoping; I think I confused a few of them with my referring to her as an apprentice. Then the 6th graders got all excited thinking our student teacher from last spring, Miss W, would be coming back again. No, our new teacher will be Miss M and she'll be here for most of November, starting on the 8th.

The 7th and 8th graders were extra quiet today. It's either lasting effects from Mrs. L, or they were just happy to have me back. Whatever the reason, it was nice. Bells went okay today too. We had to highlight our new songs and one of them threw me for a loop. The second page had two sharps instead of one but I hadn't noticed a key change, and when we played it, it sounded awful, like a totally different song. Just random notes. The bottom of the page didn't have the double bar showing it was the end of the song, so I figured we were just missing a page of the song. It turns out Miss S had accidentally copied the second page of a totally different song! So she copied the correct page and I stuck it in all the folders. Thursday they'll have to re-highlight that page, but I'm sure the song will sound MUCH better.

My kiddos said they're coming to my house trick or treating tonight, so I should head home to pass out candy. We talked about the tradition of Trick or Treating and where it came from, how Martin Luther probably went door to door and got cider and some kind of treat/snack... I said I thought about baking cookies too and passing them out. Some kids said they'd rather have cookies than candy! So maybe I will mix up a batch...