Instilling a passion for reading at a young age is important, especially when you’re competing with television and video games. But, the love of storytelling lives on! Over 89,000 young writers in 2,000 classrooms wrote their stories and novels during last year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November— and your students could join in the fun.
The History of NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo isn’t a national holiday or an awareness campaign the same way breast cancer awareness dominates October or history classes focus on the African-American experience in February. It started back in 1999 with a group of 21 adult writers in San Francisco, who set themselves a goal to “complete a novel” within a single month.
Few participants actually crossed the finish line with a completed manuscript in the first year, but all enjoyed the challenge of ‘noveling’ marathon-style. In fact, they enjoyed it enough to run the gauntlet again next year—and the year after. Over a decade later, NaNoWriMo allows hundreds of thousands of writers from all backgrounds, ages, and abilities to challenge themselves and their story-telling skills in this 30-day dash.
The Young Writers Program
As NaNoWriMo’s popularity with adults grew, the organizers realized an opportunity to share the joy of storytelling with students. In 2005, the Young Writers Program (YWP) was formed. That year, the YWP started with 150 schools and 4,000 student-writers, and ended with—as former NaNoWriMo Director Chris Baty put it—“ freshly minted nine-year-old novelists, school-sponsored teen noveling lock-ins, and wonderstruck English teachers who couldn’t believe that the whole thing worked so well.”
Embracing the modern young writer’s affinity for online tools, NaNoWriMo established a microsite especially for YWP participants. It combines social forums and “challenges” among participants to keep up their motivation with practical resources covering the technical and inspirational aspects of long-form writing.
For educators, professional resources like noveling lesson plans and workbooks for students in kindergarten through their senior year of high school are available for free download via Google Docs. The site also maintains virtual classrooms to organize online activities, as well as additional information about what to do with all those finished manuscripts come November 30th.
Students aren’t required to complete the same 50,000-word goal as their fellow adult writers. There’s a Word-Count Goal Calculator on the YWP site for students who have trouble devising what their personal word count goals should be. YWP advises that students choose a goal that is “high enough to be challenging (but not impossible) to reach.”
The Student Experience
Teachers that use NaNoWriMo as an inspirational resource report great success. As middle school teacher Noriko Nakada told National Writing Project, her students “have so much more confidence as writers. Hey, if they can write a novel, a research paper is nothing!”
Elementary school teacher Stephen Slaughter agrees with Nakada, telling his students during NaNoWriMo that “you will never be given an assignment this ambitious, and because you have conquered it, you know that you can conquer more. You are unstoppable.”
Salome Milstead challenged her students to take on NaNoWriMo in her classroom, and found that they weren’t intimidated by the prospect of writing a novel. She told Edutopia:
If you can teach them to silence that inner critical voice so they can get their ideas on paper, then you can teach them to put commas in the right place, restructure it, and find the missing introductory sentence—that part is easy. The hard part is getting kids who've been discouraged, who've lost internal motivation, to write again.
This year, set the challenge before your students to see what they can accomplish! And, you don’t have to try to execute the program this November if there’s not enough time to prepare. While there’s certainly a lot of publicity and momentum for writers who attempt the noveling marathon in the fall—hashtags #nanowrimo and #amwriting frequently trend in November—there’s no reason in the world you couldn’t make a similar effort in, say, January (JanNoWriMo?) or at any other time. In the end, all that matters is the challenge of writing a story in 30 days—and the feeling of accomplishment for attempting a seemingly daunting task, regardless of whether a writer finishes or not.
Additional ISM resources:
Research: The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing Is Taught in Schools
Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 8 No. 9 Journaling Isn't Just Personal
Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 10 No. 4 A Story of Teaching Excellence
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 35 No. 6 The 21st Century School: Students and Individualized Instruction
I&P Vol. 36 No. 8 21st Century Teaching: Stability and Challenge
