Noveling Club

Earlier this year a friend of mine told me about a site called homeschoolfreebieoftheday.com
where they have a free downloadable resource every day. A couple of months ago they offered a free ebook on hosting a Junior Secret Noveling Club. It sounded like fun and two of my kids were interested so we started our club in early September.

The first order of business was to name our club. The book suggested having each member choose a word that inspired them and then use all those words in the title. Our club was called:

The Junior Secret Imagination Butterfly Tempted Courage Magic Scar Noveling Club

We started with six members - 2 girls and 4 boys - but lost one of our girls early on, poor Miriam! The other 5 members completed the 8-week program and had a lot of fun in the process.

Our lessons were broken down as follows:

Week 1: Genre - kids learn what this means and choose the genre for their books

Week 2: Hero - kids choose the hero of their story (protagonist)

Week 3: Villain - kids choose the villain in their story (antagonist)

Week 4: Conflict - kids decide what the main conflict in their story will be

Week 5: Setting - kids choose five settings that will be in their story, including time, weather and objects present.

Week 6: Plot - kids fill in a plot map including: introduction, inciting incident, complication, climax and conclusion.

Week 7: Analysis - putting together much of the previous information on a single form and discussing how things will 'flow' in their stories.

Week 8: Chapter list - kids complete a list of 10 chapters showing the main action and setting for each chapter.

It was awesome to see the different ideas each kid came up with. It was also fun to see the difference between the boys and girl. For example, Miriam chose the genre Fantasy and planned to include in her book: unicorns, people, romantic, adventure, grassy yards with flowers and girls that wear dresses. Isaiah, on the other hand, also chose Fantasy as his genre but planned to include: wizards, elfs, guns, hobbits, ice and fire. Lol!

Young novelists hard at work. A snack was always provided to feed their busy brains. (-:

As they were painting pictures of their villains I pulled out my camera and this is the result. They didn't want to get 'shot', I guess... Sorry.





Miriam painting her villain, the mad scientist. (He kidnaps the princess, Rebeka)

Isaiah painting his villain, the emperor. (He wants to take over the world)




All our club members proudly show off their finished notebooks and their 'fuzzy pens' which each member recieved as their reward for finishing the program to use in writing the novel they had planned out during club.

...and here they show their true selves. Lol!