Hello hello once again!

It’s November, which means my annual return to weekly blogging for a month before I once again disappear into the abyss, only to return sporadically when I think of something I just HAVE to share online.

Once again, as we do every year, we have made it to National Novel Writing Month. I know, we literally NEVER thought November would come. Only 114,329 more weeks of 2020 y’all!

I am SO PUMPED for NaNoWriMo this year, as once again I am writing amidst my group of seventh graders. People talk about all the words they “secretly” wrote while working, but then there’s me, writing WITH my students. When they read, I read. When they write, I write! What better way is there to model two fundamental parts of not just education, but life?

Why am I EXTRA pumped for this year? That’s because for the first time, we are completing NaNoWriMo as a class project across the entire grade level. So at my middle school, (almost) all seventh graders are writing DAILY, contributing to a larger writing project than most of them have ever written.

With this, I have made some tweaks to the program to make it easier for us all. 2020 is pure havoc, and to be a teacher is one of the hardest jobs right now. We have both face to face and virtual students all day, so we always look for the path of least resistance.

When I pitched this idea originally, it was going to be campus-wide. But a forgetful admin who is also stretched thin never sent the email, and I started to realize that, since I had offered to facilitate it, I was also stretching myself so thin trying to keep up with it all. So I never attempted to remind him. I am waiting for the day he realizes it (or maybe he never will), but in the meantime, I found a different way that I’m just as happy about.

Instead, I threw it out there to my 7th grade team during a planning day in October. Originally, I just wanted them to also offer it as an extra credit opportunity as I always did in the past. But we kept talking and suddenly we were just gonna go for it!

It’s not our full-on lesson plans. We don’t have time for a month-long fiction writing unit. So we tweaked it a bit. For this NaNoWriMo, students are:

1. not setting a word count goal – not traditional, I know, but I have seen over the years so many students set an unrealistic goal considering that most do not write outside of my class. Even though YWP allows them to update their goal, they see themselves falling behind (YWP still says “at this rate, you’ll be finished on ________), and give up.
2. writing during class everyday for 10-15 minutes – I change up the timer everyday to keep them on their toes. To them, 15 minutes is a lot, but 12 minutes isn’t. This way they know even if they don’t want to be writing everyday, it’s a short amount of time. The ones who really want to write will keep doing it after the finish their work, in other classes, etc.
3. free writing – some are writing a story over the course of the month. Some are journaling, some are writing stream of consciousness style, some use my daily optional prompts – it depends on the day. I just want them to write!
4. going to share a paragraph or a couple at an event in December where we will celebrate our successes over the month.

I have the results for week one already (for my students only at this time) and will publish them in a post on Sunday morning, so be on the lookout, because after just 4 days of writing, the number of words that were written by students is ASTOUNDING!

I’ll also share my current word count, which at this time is dismal, and to be honest I’m just hoping I can catch up more over the weekend before I admit how far behind I am already haaaa!

Cheers to another NaNoWriMo, and may the words be with you!