Beam us up, Scotty…
“A special invitation to Year 1, 2, 3, 4 & 6 children.
Market Day; the kids have organised themselves in shifts for their various duties (parents are told NOT to assist), with groups taking turns onstage to advertise their products throughout
As part of the ‘Enterprise’ unit of inquiry through the theme ‘How We Organise Ourselves’, the Year 5 children have spent 6 weeks researching, designing, innovating and producing an array of unique and personalised goods to sell at unbelievable prices..”
Most pics from school albums; if anything is not ok as always someone please say the word and it’ll be gone 🙂 I really like the top-most pic because it reminds me of something from Where’s Wally? Except it’s Where’s Math? Reading/ Writing/ Art? Learning today looks nothing like what we did on this planet decades ago. (Desks, chairs and papers are still around but the aliens are doing something else with them. Plus, there seems to be a cultural revolution going on onstage…)
Vote Sunglasses for POTUS? (pic from postcrom.com)
“Their hard work will culminate in the Year 5 Market Day where the rest of the Kennedy School students are invited to purchase Year 5 products…. arts & craft, stress balls, key chains, bookmarks, brownies, cookies, popcorn…..”
“Prices range from around $5 to $20 and all profits will be donated to our four house charities….”
Spoiler: The Year 5s made a cool HKD 19,800.
A little like a reality game show. Enterprise: “Just” Your Regular Reality TV Game Show Of 9-10yr Old Entrepreneurs. Possible Sequel: What We Learned About Ourselves And Each Other?
Each child in a group of 5 comes up with HKD 60 to start. Then they do some serious brainstorming for product ideas (which go thru lots of vetting just like when you adhere to real game show rules; one of the big ones is the kids must come up with a market product that they make themselves. No buy-lower-sell-higher stuff off Amazon or Taobao. They have to manage and oversee the procuring of “raw materials” and the production process and agree on selling price. Plus marketing.)
What they use has to come from the HKD 300. Receipts have to be accounted for. Some kids took this really, really seriously – at one point someone asked if, when they borrow equipment to make the stuff, they need to allocate “rent cost” (and no it was not my kid, who was predominantly on tech, earlier on). Hang on lemme find the right emoji for that one.
pic frm dailymail.co.uk
Then the Y5s carried out market research on the rest of the Kennedy School kids. Survey results, costing, marketing and contingency plans to be presented to a Business Panel comprising school staff and parent volunteers, a week before Market:
Kids produce org charts, and not a few took CEO or CFO roles to the tee, dressing for the part (Rockstar was very happy as IT Manager and elected to stay in school uniform)
Introduce each other to Panel…
Hand out namecards, distribute product samples..
..present survey results..
…and run thru body language analysis on who is about to get fired by Lord Sugar.
Ok they don’t actually fire the kids, that’s there by way of saying I wouldn’t have thought 9-10yr olds already get such exposure and learning experiences. It really runs like one of the reality game shows for fledgling businesses… except this is done by kids and well they don’t get fired with dramatic music playing haha. And many kids can already speak very eloquently when they need to spontaneously field questions from the Business Panel (consider the difference between that and when we went to school and simply rattled off memorised facts)
It was one of those things where you think it’s a little school project for one of so many Units of Inquiry (and you’d be right – they have not a few units of inquiry and umpteen projects that go with, and that’s where all the reading, writing and math is, it just looks nuthin’ like Kumon). But. There’s more.
It’s a huge opportunity. To mess up. To have fights. To take a few risks. To get in front of an evaluation panel of adults – first thing in the morning on a Monday for some kids – to think on your feet as the panel ask thought-provoking questions about your business plan, and to sell, really sell, your product. It’s not easy. It’s not easy going first. And it’s not easy doing it when you’re 9 or 10. And so you get to mess up. And that’s awesome:
Hands up, how many of you adults out there wish you had had a chance to drop the ball at your Y5 Business Presentation before you discovered a fear of public speaking in front of 500 people at the Apple iPhone convention (or some other big deal equivalent)?
Me! Me! <waves hand about furiously> My “flubbed Y5 class presentation” equivalent was a preliminary round in a minor taekwondo tournament when I was 13. It was supposed to be an easy win and I threw it by going the day without bothering to eat, because I didn’t feel like it and figured I didn’t need tha-at many calories to win. And so I suited up and proceeded to….. utterly fail. My opponent beat me not by being better (neither of us scored and it came down to judging) but by showing more respect for the task.
No one else remembers that fight today, but I do. Through countless future situations, the humiliation of that defeat taught me a lesson I would not have learnt if I won everything regardless of effort. (So this really is the best time to mess up!) Because if school life is supposed to prepare you for real life then getting an A from 2 minutes of effort is like death to your future self’s motivation levels to work hard someday. The goal in life is not “all As in class”, the goal in life is to not die from complacence and so I have this half baked idea how winning without trying for older kids is one of those “understated risks” that the proverbial market hasn’t priced in to your trading price. (Umm, ok a better analogy than that – the recent movie “Gifted”. Awesome acting but mess of misdirection in storyline aside, Rockstar commented that before Mackenzie Grace can do all that cool rocket science math, someone still has to teach it to her and she has to practice it. She might enjoy it more than others, but she still has to work.)
Anyway, here’s a more interesting side story – Bus Buddies!
Rockstar, like the other Year 5s, has had a Year 1 “Bus Buddy” assigned to him since the beginning of the year, a minor kind of “Rite of Passage” for the older child, to have the responsibility of a younger child new to school to walk to the bus, work with on reading, and many other various projects.
In the course of school duties, Rockstar began telling Little Bus Buddy about the Y5 project, and how his team might get early samples to their bus buddies as a kind of preliminary marketing exercise, “Tell your friends you got this from the Flying Fluffers, come find us on Market Day!” Plus, their bus buddies would get a sneak preview. (Rockstar himself was once a very shy Year 1, entering primary school as the youngest in his year. While he has only good memories of his then-Y5 Bus Buddy sitting and reading with him, what he seems to enjoy even more is the current pairing where he is the older child – he became very fond of the little boy he was assigned. We often hear a lot about this kid whom, btw, aside from knowing what he looks like, we have no idea who he is :D)
As production runs and surveys carried on however, it became clear his team had a good chance of selling out without budgeting for additional marketing, and as the proceeds would all go to charity (teams were also given the option of taking back their HKD 60-per-child capital once they made a profit, but they had unanimously agreed to donate all their capital as well) it was a collective team decision not to hand out free samples after all. They wanted every product unit to sell on the day.
Reluctantly, Rockstar then explained this to LBB, that they would have to honour what his team collectively agreed upon (Rockstar being Rockstar it would not cross his mind to smuggle one out for LBB haha). When I asked him how LBB took it, he remarked the younger child had probably forgotten all about it by now – LBB had appeared non-plussed, quickly moving on as usual to his all-time favourite topic – airplanes!
Maybe a week after their conversation however, a mildly amazed Rockstar would come home from Market and tell me that LBB had showed up at the stall maybe 4 minutes after selling began – then paid HKD 15 to buy the sample Rockstar had initially pledged to give him. (Green, LBB’s favourite colour. Haphazardly made, with bits of wool sticking out unevenly, because Rockstar had only just learnt how to make them)… which left him all of HKD 5 out of his HKD 20 market spending money to go get some popcorn (which I hear was also hugely popular – because of the catchy stripy packaging, as people walked through the hall, the stripy bags could be seen everywhere -that was the popcorn group’s clever advertising 🙂 ) Now go back and look at the market photo at the start of this post. I’m not even sure I can find Rockstar’s team’s stall in there. LBB must’ve made a beeline for it. LBB btw, is five years old.
Don’t Ever Think Little Kids Can’t Do Something Powerful And Amazing For Your Bigger Kid.
Throughout the 90 minutes market session various familiar little faces from his and his team mates’ Bus and Play Buddies volunteer sessions would appear. As part of the “Game Show Rules”, there is a strict “no parental or Y5 reciprocal buying” rule. (Parents are also specifically told not to help them with any stall setup or etc so if your younger kid appears to be getting used to everything being done for them at home, fair warning, better let ’em start practicing doing things for themselves now 🙂 ) The Year 5s are supposed to campaign, advertise, and sell to kids in the other year bands. This makes them pretty much beholden to the rest of the school (that’s like, 750 other kids, roughly 150 of which are older in Y6), most of whom are younger kids they’ve been on the bus and around school with for their entire school life preceding.
Now, there’s a karmic lesson about doing unto others. If you would have a friend, you need to be one.
One of Rockstar’s Y5 friends from another group who has been fretting and fretting about all the other competition (like, half a dozen groups across Year 5 wanted to sell that same product) ends up with all their wares snapped up before the proverbial “halftime”. The timely release of “relevant market information” with some correlation to their product (fidget spinners happened to have been banned, the prior week…
“These toys are a fabulous support for children that suffer ADHD or have other learning disorders, to enable them to focus… …For other children these toys can do the opposite, by over stimulating them and actually causing them to fidget and not concentrate! With our children being exposed to so many external stimuli including IPads, TV and computer games, the last thing they need is more stimulation…”
…possibly causing the spike in demand for home made stress-balls 🙂 ) Grateful for that bit of good fortune, he “pays it forward,” then coming over to assist Rockstar in his marketing efforts.
Year 1 LBB is preceded only by one of Rockstar’s regular bus stop mates who, granted, being in Year 4 is older and found the stall in like, a heartbeat (what is it with kids these days, do they come with GPS). “My first friend there,” Rockstar remarks later. When I mention to the friend’s mum how much Rockstar had appreciated his friend dropping by, she tells me her son had been reminding her since several days earlier, and well:
“That’s what friends are for 🙂 “
And so these are the voyages of the Enterprise 😉
Epilogue:
Rounding up the “unit (that) can be very challenging for the children in terms of their group work and social skills,” Rockstar began coming home with stories of “secret angels,” this game where the kids pick lollies with friends’ names on them, and they have to be that friend’s “secret angel” for the day. Everyone else guesses who your angel was, and who you were angel to. Rockstar thought it would be funny to say nice/ thoughtful things to everyone – but with differences in intonation, delivery or facial expression as clues to who he was really angel for. Ok, Drama School.
See, it only looks like we’re still going to school on the same planet.
