Grant-writing Skills

October is International Children and Youth Month, and I've been feeling like we're ready to throw in some unschooling. I don't think we could use it as a year-round style, but it would be nice to give it a try. So, I've told my son that we will celebrate the special month with independent projects.

After a decade of working in social development, I consider grant-writing an important skill to have, especially for creative people. So, today we worked on proposals. The first steps were to make a list of several projects that he'd like to do, we talked about the different ideas and evaluated the logistics - resources, space, time, parent availability... I told him that he could either do one big project, or several smaller ones. He narrowed it down to three projects: making a book about the Saber Tooth Tiger, writing and composing a song on his guitar, making an elaborate painting and framing it. Next, we worked on making a schedule and distributing time among the three projects. This was a good exercise in time administration. I filled in certain times on the schedule because I do want to keep two hours a day for straight-up grammar and math, and a few other specialty classes that he only has once a week - like third language and soccer. The rest of the time was up to him to play with. He got a bit flustered with so much information on the weekly table, so we worked through it together. We'll spend the rest of September working on mission statements, objectives, and methodology for each project.