Sunday, August 21, 2011

One Year Adventure Novel

For English this year E12 is doing the One Year Adventure Novel. He has been super excited to get started and kept asking all summer if we could just start already. We began this week and so far he loves it. If you click the link and watch the introductory video, E12 is the perfect kid for this program. He has lots of ideas, but begins to wash out part way through his story. The program is designed to develop the outline of your story for the first semester and in the second semester you construct your novel. At the end you can share your novel on the website.

The first task is to watch the video segment for the day, read from the text book called The Compass, and then do exercises from the workbook called The Map. At least so far...part way through we'll begin work on the novel rather than doing the workbook which is the outline of the novel. Each of The Map exercises requires a teacher evaluation based on a rubric. There are also weekly quizzes.

Some days we get to read excerpts from other adventure novels.

I am going through the process with E12 so we can evaluate each others work. Seeing the instruction and going through the process will help me to be a better sounding board for our new author.
This was an assignment on point of view- switching points of view is no good. Our novels will be in the first person.
So far we are enjoying it a lot. The program's author and instructor is interesting to watch and the video segments are pretty compelling. I'm excited to see how E12's novel shapes up with some direction. We hope to revisit the One Year Adventure Novel again in 10th or 11th grade to see how his writing matures.

1 comment:

Fairly local said...

It looks like you are off to a great start!