Hi! It's Zoe. The holidays have been very busy for me and I've celebrated them in so many ways. First was my birthday party.

At my birthday party, I invited my friends over to my house where we decorated stockings that became their party bags to take home filled with goodies. Then we played basketball and sang Karaoke. I love to sing.  And finally we made cupcakes at "cupcake station" in the kitchen. Mommy made un-iced cupcakes that we were able to decorate ourselves. We had three different designs to pick from; a shoe, a purse, and a fish. They came from a book I have on fun food designs. Everyone enjoyed it, though some might not have turned out exactly like the book, we enjoyed each other's work. I think it was my best birthday party ever. 

Another interesting holiday celebration was my 5th Grade Christmas play! And guess what? After trying out and waiting for a few days for the teachers to make their decisions, I got the part of Santa Clause! or as he was known, White Beard, for A Pirates Christmas.It was really challenging because I needed to memorize so many lines and sing and dance. It was a great experience.  It was so much fun and people thought I did a wonderful job. Yeah! 

I have two clips of the performance. A short outtake of a funny bit where I have to walk real fast behind the sleigh pushing it. My family laughed at this because I'm moving quickly and waving funny. The other clip is almost the entire play. It starts where I come in. Hope you enjoy the videos. 

One last thing for this holiday special blog, I want to share my district choir performance with you. We performed for the Night of Lights celebration. I was a little disappointed by how short our performance was, but we made the most out of the small portion of time we were given. We sang four songs. The one below (video - I'm in the green elf hat) was my favorite. We did a great job in my eyes, and I am glad I was a part of it. 

We also had a choir field trip. We went caroling to different places such as hospitals, district central office, and schools. I have to say that it felt good to cheer people up. We ended the trip at Peter Piper Pizza to have fun after a long day. 

So there you have it, my holiday celebrations this year! I hope you had a happy holiday. This wraps up my first year blogging. I will be writing in the new year. I hope 2014 is a great one!

Hi! It's Zoe. First, I want to give a little recap of things I've done since my last blog. For Halloween, I dressed up as a man-woman and went as a "couple". My school had a costume competition based on the book Miss Ataineus, where a child picked a vocabulary word from one of their subjects and makes a costume out of it. I picked the word "couple" and my mommy and I made a creative costume for it. In the end, I won the prize for best costume! 

Most recently, I spent the month of November participating in my fifth year of NaNoWriMo writing challenge. In fact, NaNoWriMo is the reason I have been doing the blog this year. I've been doing NaNoWriMo since I was six years old. In the month November each year, people all over the world set their writing goals for National Novel Writing Month. This year I had to reach 10,000 words. 

At first thought, it didn't seem too big since many authors write hundreds of thousands of words in one book.But, if you think about it and experience it, you might change your mind. That's what happened to me. After calculating the average words I needed to write per day to meet my goal, I found out I needed 333 words per day to accomplish my goal. To me, that was not too bad. But, trying to write after school, doing all my homework and chores, I realized it was hard to keep up with my goal, and I started to fall behind. In the last few days of November, I was writing 800-1000 words trying to catch up. After a lot of struggle, I was able to reach my goal, and I got a certificate of achievement! My novel is called, Under the Surface. NaNoWriMo provides five free hard copies to the kids who meet their writing goals. I can't wait to get mine. 

So, that's it. This was my summary of all the exciting things I've been doing since my last blog. If you want to become a writer, NanoWriMo is a great way to practice. It's easy to sign-up. Have your mommy or daddy help you. It helped me. Bye!