For those of you that don't know, my mother teaches 5th grade and has always been interested in new teaching techniques. She came up with the idea to create a web site that her students could create content for. They would create lessons that went along with the class curriculum and post them on the site. The students were the ones that came up with the name Homework Jungle.
So my mother approached me to help her with writing a grant proposal for the ING Unsung Heroes grant. ING has created a great award structure. From there site:
Each year, 100 finalists receives $2,000 while three of them are selected as Top Winners to receive additional grants of $25,000, $10,000, and $5,000.The proposal entails writing plans for the use of each of the possible awards. So we had to create a plan for using $27,000. We entered with the hope of just being a state finalist and getting the $2,000. So when her principal got a call from ING we were all surprised. We got the state and third place national awards. To top that off, her school district matched it. With that money we were able to get 30 netbooks and several other cool toys for the classroom.
In the next few posts I will go over what we have done with her classroom, what we have been doing with the web site, and what lessons we have learned along the way.
