Sunday, November 9, 2014

Navigating NaNoWriMo in Fifth Grade

This year, I have three classes for writing and wanted to find a way to make National Novel Writing Month manageable, challenging, and fun for my students. They will write a novel in November, and they have to put their inner editors away in order to produce a lot of writing in a short time. In December, the inner editors will come back out, and they will revise and edit portions of their novels. We just finished a narrative writing unit focusing on personal narratives. NaNoWriMo is a great chance to explore a different type of narrative writing. 

My writing classes are four times a week for 45 minutes each. One day a week will be devoted to writing their novels. The students can use laptops or write in their journals. 

We set word count goals based on how much they could write or type in ten minutes. Students figured out a weekly amount and then multiplied it to find the monthly goal. I already have students reporting that they surpassed their original word count goals for the week.
They are excited and self motivated!

We will be delving into plots and subplots, author style, character developments, flashbacks and more.

In future posts, I will share some of their story ideas and/or excerpts from their stories. 

No comments:

Post a Comment