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Students telling their stories

I think the greatest way teachers can help students is by letting them tell their story and paying attention to it. This can be by a short story assignment or just encouraging kids to write. Especially for kids who are bullied--we have a lot on our minds that often goes unsaid because we felt like no one would care. It's important to encourage students to write about their experiences so that they could try to learn from them.

A great resource I found, though it seems a little rushed, is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. This website encourages people, student or not, to write a "novel" in the month of November and submit it at the end of the month.

What you do is you make a profile so that you can start your novel on November 1st. And every time you write, you copy and paste your progress into their website so they can keep track of your progress. You earn badges along the way and even get some feedback from other users. This is a great way to encourage kids to write because the website makes it fun and exciting. Plus, you get feedback. Ways to improve.

My only problem with this is because this happens only once each year, the writing feels very rushed. So I was thinking I could make my own version of this for my students so that they can participate in it no matter what month it is, and this way it doesn't feel fast paced. (November is a busy month. You're not shaving and there are exams coming up and all that...)

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