NaNoWriMo for Youth, Not Just for Adults!

      Have you ever heard of National Novel Writing Month? I just learned about it this summer and started a program called 4-H NaNoWriMo boot camp. The program was for kids of all ages in the 4-H program interested in creative writing and my group had kids from 6-19 years old. My supervisors for this program did not think it was an appropriate idea for kids that young, but I completely disagreed.
      So, incase you do not know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s a month long writing event that tries to get adults to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, some famous books that came out of that are Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
I thought this was a great idea, but maybe way too difficult for the age range that I was trying to get interested in Creative Writing, so I changed up the rules a little bit. I made it so that each participant could make up their own word –count goal, and if they weren’t sure we had different word counts based on the ages of the kids. After the idea formed I really needed help convincing people that it was a good idea to start up this program. After much coaxing, I convinced my supervisor that it was a great teaching aid for people to learn about goal setting. I convinced her that each youth member would have to set their own goal that they thought they could do in a month and try their best to reach it. Some kids set low goals because they had crazy lives and ended up surpassing it, others set really high goals and ended up coming a little short. This taught them that they needed to work on time management and realize how much is actually feasible for each of them.
       I held this program in July and had 20 participants, it was a huge success we had 1 adult leader and 2 youth leaders who helped me run all the meetings and kept the energy level high so that people would want to come back. Even though I had to convince people that NaNoWriMo was not just for adults, in the end it was a worth argument that I proved throughout my whole program.