National Novel Writing Month

National Novel Writing Month National Novel Writing Month National Novel Writing Month By Mark Nichol On Tuesday, November 1, a couple hundred thousand people around the world will participate in National Novel Writing Month, which, despite its intuitive name, I’ll explain here: The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (that’s about 175 manuscript pages, based on a count of approximately 300 words per page) in thirty days. That’s about 1,700 words, or six double-spaced manuscript pages, give or take, a day assuming that you write every day. Insane? More like insanely ingenious. The idea behind this seemingly insurmountable goal is to write for quantity, not for quality to dash off a first draft under the auspices of a worldwide project to distance yourself from the little voice in your head that tells you that you should go back and polish that passage, pare that paragraph, or prune that page. It’s basically hours and hours of feverish, fervent, frantic freewriting a technique for unleashing your creativity by abandoning any pretext of inserting your editorial alter ego into the process. Write, write some more, and just keep on writing, without looking back. The sponsors of NaNoWriMo, as it’s abbreviated, acknowledge that may seem like a risky endeavor. You may limp to a finish at midnight on November 30, only to discover that you have devoted much of your precious time to churning out what? What did you accomplish? The product of a few hundred thousand keystrokes. Is it ready for publication? Hardly. But no novel, no short story, no poem, no article or review or essay or other composition, is print-ready. That’s not the point. The point is that you will have overcome your trepidation at devoting so much time and effort toward crafting a towering achievement in prose, using the novelty of the project as an excuse. And then you will have a first draft of a novel (and then the real work starts). Last year, only a little more than 10 percent of participants reached their goal of producing the first draft of a 50,000-word novel. But nearly 200,000 others staggered away from their computers on the last day of November with at least the start of something satisfying. Sign up at the NaNoWriMo Web site, and explore the site’s features to help you motivate yourself. One of these is a tool that lets you update your word count daily. You can also post excerpts of your work in progress for others to read. So, are you going to give it a shot? Of course you are. Good luck! Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Fiction Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:7 English Grammar Rules You Should Know20 Pairs of One-Word and Two-Word FormsA Yes-and-No Answer About Hyphenating Phrases

Bulletin Boards as a Part of a Learning Environment

Bulletin Boards as a Part of a Learning Environment Best Practices dictate that you use your bulletin boards. Too often, teachers evaluate each other by how clever their bulletin boards are, especially at the beginning of the school year. Many teachers dip into their own pockets and buy bulletin boards already made, but handmade bulletin boards offer opportunities to: Display Student Work (as models of acceptable or good quality school product.)Support InstructionReinforce desired behaviors Display Student Work Posting student work offers two important impacts on classroom management: Reinforce and motivate students by recognizing their best work product.Model the sort of work that you want students to create. Star Student Work: A dedicated section of the board to post good quality work each week can help motivate students. Project Board: Project-based learning is one way to keep kids excited about learning and fully engaged. In self-contained programs, try rolling from subject to subject: after a big reading project, you start a big science project, or a big inter-subject project, like planning a house or a trip, including making budget (math,) finding a flight (research) and writing an imaginary journal (language arts.) One board could be the project board and turn over every time a new project comes up. Student of the Week: One way to support self-esteem, help students learn about each other and even to do a little public speaking is by having a student of the week. Choose them randomly rather than with any reflection of their behavior (dont decide on Monday that Johnny can no longer be the student of the week because of a bad recess.) Post their picture, a format for each child to tell about favorite foods, television shows, sports, etc. Include some of their work, or if your students portfolio fork, have them choose some papers or project they are particularly proud of. Support Learning Student Boards: Put students in charge of creating a board or boards to go with topics you are studying. Make creating the board (brainstorming, choosing what to find pictures of) a class project. You can have a few students responsible for individual boards, or you can have all students participate by doing research. Teach them how to right click on images online to save them in a file, and then show them how to insert into a Microsoft Word document to print. You will need to check your schools policy for colored output-hopefully you have access to at least one color printer. Word Walls: From kindergarten to graduation, a word wall with important words/terms to learn should be a part of regular instruction. For social studies, you may want to review new terms both as they come up and merely as you are reviewing for assessment. You can involve students in creating the board background (our first will use an undersea theme with sponge painting.) High-frequency words should also be part of word walls, especially with struggling readers. You might want to cluster words with similar endings or with the same irregularity. Interactive Boards: Boards that are puzzles or provide students with practice can be a fun way to use some wall space. A free website provides some fun ideas for interactive boards. Reinforce Desired Behavior There are many ways to reinforce positive classroom behavior. Positive Behavior Support  can include group rewards (a marble jar) awards (best speller, most improved) and homework charts. Your boards can also function to put individual students on notice, either a color chart or color-coded cards.