Have You Ever Wanted to Be an Author?

November would be a good time to test your students' writing ability—it's the tenth anniversary of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's is a fun approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing in early November.

The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Despite the name, the project is now international in scope. In 2008, the competition had over 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output, because of the limited writing time window. So, it's all about quantity, not necessarily quality. Participants don't have time to agonize about whether their work is good or bad; they have to just sit down and write and write and write, 1,667 words a day.

When they turn off their internal editor, they will, without question, create a lot of silly and stupid content. But there will also be flashes of creativity that would never have happened if you'd had time for second-guessing. After the month has ended, participants can always go back and try to polish and rewrite their novel. There's even a National Novel Editing Month during the spring. Or they can just consider NaNoWriMo a lark or a way to "prime the pump" for more polished projects in the future.

NaNoWriMo also encourages secondary school participants that are 13 to 17 years old. Students can sign up to participate on their own or get a teacher to develop a class project where each student in that class registers and participates. This type of activity helps to develop creative writing skills which may often be neglected in many schools.

Studying author and great writing gets a lot easier when you copy and use ProQuest model BookCarts. The following BookCarts are available to make assignments to your students:

• Contemporary American Literature and Authors
• John Steinbeck and His Works
• Hispanic Authors Writing in English
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• Censorship and Banned Books
• Dr. Seuss and Allegory

Each has several examples of essential questions for critical thinking (you can create or substitute others) to guide students and ensure that they do more than copy and paste facts for their reports. Each also provides students with sample directions for the report or presentation that can be edited to meet your needs as the teacher.

• Logon to the eLibrary CE TEACHER EDITION to access BOOKCART EDITOR.
• Click the BOOKCART ADMIN link at the top right of the Teacher Edition.
• Click the PROQUEST CARTS tab.
• Type the title of the BookCart of interest in the Search box.
• Click the COPY icon in the ACTIONS column to the right of this title.
• Click RETURN TO MY LOCAL CARTS.
• Repeat for additional Carts of interest.

BookCarts can easily be edited to meet the needs of your students:

• Click the new BookCart Title; it will have the prefix "COPY OF."
• Delete "Copy of" and then type your first and last name in the AUTHOR boxes.
• Type your email address in the EMAIL box, or your initials as the required filler info.
• Option: edit the samples of EDUCATOR CHALLENGE QUESTIONS in the DESCRIPTION box.
• Scroll down and click SAVE.
• Click MY LOCAL CARTS tab to see your edited Cart, ready for students to use.

You may also want to download our new complete listing of the 800 ProQuest Carts collection http://www.proquestk12.com/pic/downloads/eLibModelBookcarts_CurrAreaTab.pdf. The list is organized by curriculum area and the titles are in alphabetical order. Each Cart title is hyperlinked to the ProQuest collection, so that clicking it while in the Teacher Edition will give you a shortcut to copying it to your local collection.

Teachers are not responsible for expecting their students to write 50,000 word novels. But they are responsible for helping students to learn how to write creatively and enjoy the process. Students can learn about style and other techniques that successful writers use by reading and discussing great literature of the past and the present in their classrooms.

Assign students to write a report of at least 150 words or create a PowerPoint presentation of at least seven slides that addresses one of the three essential questions at the end of one of these two study units: The Historical Novel and The Postmodern Novel.

Click Study Pages > Genre Pages > Scroll down, select from one of the two choices above

Use our custom ProQuest models for written or PowerPoint reports written and PowerPoint-style reports.

Assign students to write a report on the use of cartooning as a form of communicating ideas and opinions to the masses through newspapers and magazines.

Assign students to select at least three cartoon images and explain what the cartoon conveys to the reader and why that strategy can be more effective than a narrative description of the same idea.

Click Study Units > Type "The History of Cartoons" in Study Unit Title Search

SPREAD THE WORD | DATABASE TOOLKITS @ PROQUEST