Frigid Impact

5th grade students wrote this novel over the course of six months. Students were given an assignment to write a 25,000 word novel about a boy and a girl who need to go from their classroom to the office. Each room along the way should be a chapter that begins as characters enter the room and end 1,500?2,000 words later as the characters leave the room. Our ultimate goal was to create a plot that flows from one room to the next. My goal, as the teacher, was to develop an assignment where writing concepts would be encountered as they came up in the context of a meaningful project.I am extremely proud of my students. Their dedication to this project has more than advanced them to the next grade level; it has made them novelists before the age of twelve. Please excuse their errors and enjoy their efforts because they enjoyed writing this novel more than filling out worksheets, studying weekly spelling words, and practicing for standard tests.