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Monday 7 November 2011

NaNoWriMo 2011

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur* but we're now seven days into November, and we all know what that means.  NaNoWriMo is GO!



This year we have a staggering 59 students signed up to take part with us, and some added extras too: the younger brothers and sisters of some of our students who are still in Primary school but who have signed up and are working with us in our virtual classroom and visiting the library for the after-school write-ins.  The down side f numbers like this is that we only have 21 computers in the library, and they're heavily over used even when there aren't nearly 60 novelists trying to bash out 50,000 words before the end of the month.  We've been saved though, by Mrs Wilkins in ICT who has allowed our writers to use one of the ICT rooms most lunchtimes, and by Ms Twomey in MFL who has offered us use of their IT room too.

Additional salvation has come in the form of a very generous investment from our dedicated PTA, who have funded the purchase of ten new netbooks for use in the library.  This is a move that we couldn't have hoped to make with our current budget and makes a very significant difference to what we can offer our students. Once lending agreements have been drawn up and signed, there will also be the opportunity for these machines to be loaned out to students who don't have computers of their own, which will be a huge help to them during coursework crunch times.

So far our novelist have written a staggering 264,314 words, and we're beating the US school who challenged us to a Word War by 19% to 17%, which may seem like a small margin, but their target wordcounts are significantly lower than ours!  The level of ambition shown by our students is truly remarkable.  Almost as remarkable as the sheer numbers of snacks they can get through...



*This is not an exaggeration, have been ill and everything has been distinctly fuzzy...

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