My 9th-grade ELA students participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). All students write a draft of a novel in November and then revise it over the course of the year. Students in the advanced studio art class collaborate with the writers to illustrate the covers, and we publish with Barnes & Noble Press. For students who struggle with a book-length project, I compile their stories into an anthology. Students who reach 50,000 words, the word count for NaNoWriMo, get a gold sticker on their books. Students feel a real sense of accomplishment and pride seeing their masterpieces displayed in the class bookcase.

— Cara Cifferelli, ELA teacher at John Dewey HS, Brooklyn

Send your classroom photos to uftphotos [at] gmail [dot] com (uftphotos[at]gmail[dot]com).