Big Spenders

Book order time! My kids had a bunch this time... Over $100! That means I got lots of points to order books for our class. Woohoo! And I had a big list of books to buy, so it worked out for everyone. There's one 7th grader who might still order books online tonight, so I'm waiting to officially place the order until tomorrow. So far, nothing, so she might not be ordering anything.

Don't worry, I'm not still at school at this late hour. Time slipped away from me after school (I was quite productive) and I had to run errands before I had a chance to write on here. One of my errands was a flu shot... my arm is starting to get sore. It gives me a good excuse to take the night off from cleaning and focus on other things.

Our morning was full of brainstorming... lots of kids needed sparking for NaNo ideas, and I think all of them have ideas they're excited about now. One girl's story is particularly intriguing... There's a girl who cleans houses for people. An old lady died and her family hired this girl to clean the house to get it ready to sell. The girl has a pet pig that comes with her, and she puts her hand on a door to open it and gets sucked through into a new world. On the other side her hair and clothes are transformed into crazy things, her pig can suddenly fly and talk, and her cleaning stuff has turned into things that she might need in this world. Everyone is going to hear the queen talk, so she heads to the palace too to see what's going on, and a guy knocks her over as he's running away. It's the prince! He's on a mission to do... something she's not sure yet, and her main character has to help him. In the end she has to decide if she's going to stay in this world or go back to being a cleaning lady in the real world. Dun dun dun!

Another boy is going to have his character get knocked off a bridge into a river. He can't swim, so he thinks he's going to die. But he gets sucked into a tunnel and in the tunnel is a thing that can make his dad not be dead (the dad died in the story right away in the beginning).

And that's just two of the stories! We focused a lot on character wants vs. character needs and conflict in stories, so I'm sure our stories this year will be better than ever! Only six days til NaNo starts... I still need to figure out what I'm writing. Or at least find a first sentence. Again, a few prompts/dialogue chunks on my pinterest board popped out at me while I brainstormed with students, but nothing that I wrote down. It's a task for this weekend.

Last night I buckled down and got my papers graded. But there's another big stack to work on tomorrow morning. Sigh, oh well, it's the nature of the beast.