It’s the end of week 2 of National Novel Writing Month, so you know what that means — time for an update on my students’ progress!

I promise this post will be shorter and much quicker to the point. You can recap all the information about our NaNoWriMo project in my first two posts! (One) (Two)

Once again, these is only the numbers for my students; I do not have data for the other 7th grade ELAR teachers’ students at this time, but hope that at the end I can share their numbers as well. I’m trying to figure out how to get those numbers without creating more work for my colleagues. 2020 is hard enough, am I right?

Ok, without further ado…

I have 81 students. I had a few finally start writing, so we have 66 student writers. With word counts ranging from 53 to 4,251, the total number of words written by my 7th grade students so far is:

62,363 words!

LIKE WHAT. That number is just jaw-dropping to me! 10-15 minutes of writing per class day (a few do write outside of class) and this is so much more than I ever expected already!

Here’s the daily breakdown:

Nov 2	5879
Nov 4	10517
Nov 5	17609
Nov 6	28361
Nov 9	37344
Nov 10-11	I was out 10th/11th was a holiday
Nov 12	54593
Nov 13	62363

Some of my favorite quotes from this week:

“Can we please write for a longer time tomorrow?”

“I didn’t want to stop writing!”

“I had to raise my goal from 2,000 to 4,000.”

“I raised my goal from 5,000 to 10,000!”

“I’m done with all my work can I pleaaaaaase write????” (sent via Zoom chat)

(Me – ‘Let’s do 15 minutes today’)
Student – “Yeesssss”

This challenge has complete blown me away, and to say I am so so excited about how we finish out this project is an understatement.

We have one more full week of classes this month, though it is benchmark week, so possibly not 5 days of writing for all the students this week coming up. Then we’ll be on Thanksgiving Break and I don’t foresee too many students writing at home (maybe I can find a way to motivate them hmmm…send me ideas in the comments!).

Next Friday I also plan to have students create a cover for their project, so I hope I have some of those to share next weekend!

The last day of the challenge is the day we return to school from the break, and then we’ll be prepping for our Creative Cafe event where students will get to share a short snippet of their writing for their peers and other faculty.

I will be back for another update next weekend, the last before our final word counts, though it may be late as my husband and I will be traveling next weekend.

Oh, and me? I hit 10k today (10,306). Half of where I should be, but just happy to be writing again. My co-teacher is also still banging out the words, currently sitting with 4,883 words herself!

I share your well wishes with my students, so feel free to leave some positive comments below!

Happy writing!