Autobiography

I think I'd like to use this absolutely brilliant "Portfolio" assignment for an 11th grade writing course (following a creative writing course), although I'm considering working it in sooner rather than later and doing the assignments for myself alongside my son working on them. The end-product of this year-long assignment is a publishable autobiography. The teacher who created this curriculum packet has had a great amount of success with other teachers adopting it as well, including foreign language teachers, and has used the assignments in literature classes as well (where you write the portfolio assignment "as if" you are a character in a book).

There are dozens of possible assignments and teachers usually assign between 25 and 35 of them, some as "free choice" of the student where the student can write in any style or choose an unassigned assignment from the list. One thing I like about this assignment packet is that it works well with a quality school philosophy; a teacher could assign a minimal number of pieces and give the children more freedom in selecting the bulk of their assignments and the pieces are worked to publishable perfection -- true quality work -- including designing a cover and creating a table of contents so that the book may be bound.

I would potentially use my self-publishing resources and create a perfect-bound version of my child's "High School autobiography." It would be an amazing gift to him, and to his friends and close relatives, as well as an amazing college-entrance piece.

Even more interesting would be if I could get both of my children to work on it and all 3 of our works were published in a single volume. However, since I'm not homeschooling my daughter that might be too much to ask; she'll probably be starting college or working while my son and I are working on this project.