On November 21, the Grade 4/5 classes of Ms Johansen, Ms Evans and Ms Lee held their annual PowerPlay Young Entrepreneur Show in the Maywood gym.
According to Ms Johansen, the team leader of the project, “This is a program that the Grade 4/5 classes are doing where students learn to build their own business, starting from developing their product through market research, all the way to manufacturing and selling their product, and learning about cost/price/profit, marketing, money management, and how to connect to customers” along the way.
To learn more about the project, click ‘Continue Reading’ below. And when you’re done reading the post, click the ‘Back’ button on your browser to return to the blog Mainpage.
Demonstrating perfect timing, the project finished off just in time for the gift-giving season with a market show where the entrepreneurs displayed their products for sale. Students, staff, and family came to browse and buy. Students keep the profits of their efforts (after paying back any money they borrowed for development), and donate a portion of their sales to a local charity. If you click on the ‘Full Screen’ icon in the right corner of the image, use the ‘Escape’ button to exit full screen mode and return to the post.
Below is a slideshow where you can see just some of the background work students did for this project. You can click the left and right arrows below the image to navigate back and forth or, on a touch screen, you can just swipe left or right. If the slide show doesn’t load (and you see a blank space below) hit the ‘Refresh’ button on your browser bar.
You might be surprised to know that all of the activities students engaged in on this project are part of their literacy development. It used to be that literacy only meant reading written language—books, magazines, newspapers, etc., and writing only certain forms as well—paragraphs, essays, research reports. But now ‘literacy’ refers to all kinds of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ that we need to do today, and this includes the activities Ms Johansen named in her explanation of the project.
The image below is a description of the different kinds of literacies students needed to use to complete the project. We often teach these skills to students separately, but Project-Based Learning like this combines all of them and more: students develop their Core Competencies in the areas of Personal and Social Awareness, Critical and Creative Thinking, and, Communication. Projects like this help to give students a holistic sense of an overall process and purpose.
Yes, we want all our students to be able to read and write. But we hope for so much more for them: we want them to be able to use what they know to solve their problems and achieve their goals in the real world. It looks to me like these students have made an excellent start in that direction.
The PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs program was developed by Vancouver entrepreneurs and educators for use in schools. To learn more about it, you can click here.
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