As National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) approaches, many people gear up for an enormous leap into creative writing. November has been one of my favorite months of the year for this reason, now for almost a decade, as my tenth year of participating in this program approaches. One of the areas young (and other) writers struggle with is descriptive writing. Now that so many young people spend a huge proportion of their time in front of screens, I think the other senses get neglected, and a corresponding decrease in the ability to express sensation in words comes with that. For…
As the fall gets into high gear, I will be getting on the road again. If you’re in New York, try to attend NYSCATE this year and register for my session on Singapore Math on Sunday, November 20. If you can come on Saturday, I will be giving a three-hour workshop on NaNoWriMo in the classroom, which will be fun and hands on. I will also be offering six Singapore Math full-day workshops this fall, starting in October and ending in December. The schedule and links to register for those, and for the conference, are at the bottom of my…
On Friday, my young writers and I had a Thank Goodness It’s Over party to celebrate our accomplishments during the month. The TGIO party is a well-established tradition for any NaNoWriMo group. I have always used it to showcase and celebrate each individual child’s writing. We met at a family’s home, and each child had five minutes to read an excerpt from his or her story. I was impressed by the quality of the writing; three years of doing Nano for most of them has led to exceptional storytelling abilities in these young writers. During the reading part of the…
Today is Wednesday, December 1, and November is finally over. All of the students in my program, Your Greatest Writing Adventure Ever, achieved their goals of writing a story in the month. The word count goals ranged from 1,500 to 4,700 words, and their ages ranged from seven to ten. What an amazing accomplishment! Not only the writing, but the fun they had doing it. I am so proud of everyone, but I’m also relieved that NaNaWriMo is over. In fact, doing this program is such a mammoth accomplishment that it’s pretty much a requirement to have a TGIO (Thank…
Yesterday was the first day of NaNoWriMo, and it began with a bang. My group has seven bright, eager children in it, and we all dove in to our writing projects yesterday. Prior to that, we had a couple of meetings in which we worked on character development, understanding what plot is, setting expectations, and deciding on word count goals. I think my students from previous years underestimated their abilities yet again, if yesterday was any measure; they seem to grow their ability to write fluently almost exponentially each year. I’m impressed. Even more impressive, one of our new members,…
Good news! The virtual classroom for our awesome YWP program is up and running. As soon as participants are fully signed up, they will receive login information. I have received a number of inquiries about the location of the program. The answer is: it’s up to us! Some people are north, some are south, some are middle… we will make it work, even if I travel a couple of times a week. Carpooling can help too. Remember, if you want to facilitate this, we would love your help. Let us know if you have good meeting places, and what dates…
This is the first year since 2003 that I will not be teaching NaNoWriMo in the classroom. What’s good about this is it frees me up to do it with a whole bunch of area students. I have posted a new program description for our fun, exciting adventure to come. Here are a few details not included in the program description page: Each student will get to set his or her own word count goal, usually with some consultation with me. That goal can be fairly flexible to a point in November. The idea of the program is to write…