As we now head into Thanksgiving break, I have some fun statistics and updates to share for my students’ National Novel Writing Month journeys!

Knowing that we’re on break, I do not anticipate having a week 4 update, so I plan on sharing some snippets of students’ writing in its place! Then we have four school days left before the end of the month and the end of our journey. I may have created some extrinsic motivation with the promise of a full color certificate and goody bag for each student who reaches their goal.

With that offer, I did allow students this week to change their word count goal. Some were very eager in saying they’d write 10,000 to 50,000 words. For many, I knew even 4,000 was a stretch, but I refused to question them. I let them lower their goal with zero judgement. With that, the percentages feel more realistic, but the word counts are still amazing!

So here we go –

• At this time I have 56 students who are writing, with counts ranging from 4 to 4,016.
• 14 students have written over 1,000 words.
• 4 students have over 3,000 words!

The current combined goal from all students is 176,286 words. They are 23.6% of the way to that combined goal.

My students have written 41,748 words!

This number almost doubled from last week due to giving students two full blocked periods to write as much as they can after we finished testing this week. The motivation of a goody bag may have helped as well.

With four days to go, I think my own personal goal will be to motivate them to 50,000 combined. If they can do that, we’ll have a huge celebration for every student who wrote, with special focus on the students who pushed themselves to their goal (and beyond).

Feel free to leave some motivation in the comments, and I’ll share them with my students as we finish the last four days upon our return to school!