Debates, Prologues, and Novels!

This past week was full of fun things. We started Monday with our mock presidential debates. All participants did a fantastic job. The entire morning came across very professional and at the same time very entertaining. The student's did a fantastic job staying true to their invented candidates even when time allowed for unscripted questions to be asked. After lunch that day, we had a special presentation from a Argentinian educator. It was very interesting to learn more about that country.

Tuesday and Wednesday then became our first class of the week. We began with written and oral presentations of the Prologue to Act I of Romeo and Juliet. Overall, all four classes did very well. There were a handful of students who were not prepared and have had to or will have to retest to improve that score. As we finished with our presentations, we set up accounts on The Young Writer's Program side of the NaNoWriMo web site (both sites are overloaded right now due to the high volume of participants).

Although Friday was a little different, Thursday and Friday served as our second day of the week. We took care of some retests, but focused a lot of attention on where to begin our novels and Act I of Romeo and Juliet. I gave out writing handbooks that we will use to get us through our novel writing in November. We looked at several pages in those workbooks, and in our journals we answered some important questions about the characters we had created:

What does my character want?
What is in his/her way?
How can she/he get around that obstacle?
What could go wrong with that plan.

The workbooks are for the students to use as they need them; however, there will be times throughout the month when I go over areas addressed in the books directly. It will be okay if something we do together a student has completed on their own. The remainder of the class was spent reading the first scene of Romeo and Juliet. I tried to break it down for them and with their help so we all knew exactly what was going on. This upcoming week we'll work more on Romeo and Juliet and our novels.

Friday morning we had an extended assembly where I showed some videos from three of our Friday activities: Grandfather Mountain, The Renaissance Festival, and Shake-N-Bake Museum. After our regular first through third period A day, we went to the cafeteria to kick off our novel writing. We went over tips for success in November. We locked away our internal editors. And I showed the webpage I set up to get everyone excited about starting their novels on Saturday. All of the teachers helped to create survival packs that we gave out before we spent some time planning our novels more.

We took small groups upstairs to make caramel apples while the rest talked about their novels and used the workbooks to get a good start. I have been in touch with Joyce Moyer Hostetter, a local author who will be writing alongside us in November and coming to our December celebration. Joyce is also blogging about her experiences with this insane quest. I encourage you to check out her blog.

Remember during November, every student and myself have something to do everyday! Write, Write, Write! I just broke 6,000 words this morning!