NaNoWriMo

This month is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. I think I would have been almost entirely unaware of it if a friend hadn't forwarded me a link to The Young Writers Program linked with NaNoWriMo. Almost as soon as I hit the home page, I was hooked. And the more I looked around, the more excited I got. There are some AMAZING writing resources.

So, this month Pitman Academy is participating in NaNoWriMo. My two challenges are the age spread of my students (1st, 4th, 7th) AND we didn't do any pre work last month.

On the website there are lesson plans, ideally presented in October, for every level. There is a treasure trove of resources! I printed out free lesson plans and free worksheets. There is an interactive online classroom - which we may or may not take advantage of.

For Pitman Academy participants, the first week of November is going to be spent doing a NaNoWriMo bootcamp - doing that work that would have ideally been done in October. We are going to get through as many of the lesson plans and worksheets as we can. I will be happy if the kids start writing next week. And even though the spirit of NaNoWriMo is to get it done in November, I can already see that I'm not going to cut off the kids' muses just because the calendar page changes.

I have been astonished by how hard the kids are willing to work on this. Not only do we sit together while I teach for about 40 minutes (NOT how we do homeschool, so this is a learning curve in and of itself), but will gladly do their 'homework' until bedtime. Even when I tell them they've put enough time in, they keep going.

Yesterday, we covered the basics about what is a novel and what is NaNoWriMo. Today, we talked about what makes us love or hate a book AND began developing Main Characters, Supporting Characters, and Villains.

I love that each night at supper the kids have asked each other about their NaNoWriMo work.

I am so excited and overwhelmed by this adventure.

Tomorrow, we work on plot.