As of Friday, 35 kids had signed up for NaNoWriMo! Really, it's more than that but a couple of kids decided to write in pairs and I'm good with that. One fifth grader heard about it from her brother (who didn't sign up) and wanted to try, so I told her no problem.
I even have to order more pencils because I ran out!
Today I will be going to a write in and I will also finish preparing tools to distribute to the kids tomorrow: progress charts, writing prompts and such.
I'm floored. I am absolutely, gob smacked and floored by the response.
I figured the best way to do the writing prompts was to print them on business cards and put them in a small box for each classroom. That way, each set of kids have their own set to reference during their writing time. The writing count chart is a little more difficult as each kid chose a different amount of words to write. The most common are 50 words a day (1,500 total) and 100 (3,000 total) but there are a lot of one-upping as well. The adding one more to a count over a friend as a bit of a challenge and rivalry.
Although one of the real tests for me won't actually come until the spring. My theory (and this is the stuff of which graduate theses and dissertations are made) is that these kids will excel when it comes to the MCAS because they will know that it's no big deal to write an essay. That this month they are building a habit of writing and over the next couple of months they will learn about other writing traits (revision, editing, etc.) as we clean up their November work to prepare to upload stories and publish them with their create-space code.
Of course, I also have to write my novel through all this while finishing school, working and life, the universe and everything.
To be honest, I don't know what else I'd do with myself if I didn't have all this on my plate. This is my happy writing time, I hope it is everyone else's as well.
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