To me grant writing seems very intimidating and I did not realize until this week how easy it can actually be. There are so many helpful websites with a myriad of resources to choose from. One that interested me was the Lowe's Toolbox for Education grants and I thought it might be fun to write a grant to have a fun reading area built in all the kindergarten classrooms. This could possibly be a loft with space underneath. I also thought it would be great to build a garden that all classes in the school could utilize and we could coordinate with the cafeteria on cooking some of the vegetables we have grown. A lofty thought but not impossible.
Edutopia had many grant writing opportunities and I would love to write a grant for a science curriculum from Aims at www.aimsedu.org. Our current science curriculum is not very hands or inquiry based and Aims and would benefit all our students. We could purchase 2 kits per grade level at a cost of about $12,600.00. There are many science orientated grants to choose from.
Our district does have its own Educational Foundation and an individual teacher can write a grant for up to $500.00. If two or more teacher write the grant they can receive up to $1000.00. I have written a grant that I hope gets approved for 2 iPad2s. I wrote it with the gifted facilitator and we should find out in September if the grant was approved. Last year I wrote a grant for the Daily 5 literacy program with a fellow 1st grade teacher and we were able to purchase the books and all the videos which have been very useful and gave us the tools we needed to present at an inservice. We also wrote a separate grant requesting funds for iTunes gift cards for the iPads already in our building and it was approved. We received $1000.00 to buy gift cards and they were distributed equally among the classrooms with iPads.
Although it is wonderful to have an education foundation it was extremely eyeopening this week to learn about all the other possibilities to get money. I did sign up for adopt a classroom which I learned about this week to hopefully get more books for my library since I am switching to kindergarten. I also am considering a few projects to post on donors choose which seems like a great place to get some extra items for a classroom. I am thinking about asking for an iTouch to use as part of listening to reading and also to record our reading. Just so much information and never enough time to do it all!
