Happy Tuesday dear friend!I do apologize for not showing up yesterday. I am going on vacation this week and had some things to wrap up. I do hope you’ll forgive me. Ok, we are at the finish line and I’m sooo excited for you and your students. You have learned so much about business and plants in these past 6-8 weeks, depending on how fast your kiddos work. Not only is this a great opportunity to be exposed to life skills, but if you think about it, this is also Scientific Method of sorts. Obviously there’s not a control or variable, but students are using trial and error to make their business a success. So cool! By the way, if you’re totally lost, catch up below. This is the perfect year-end project when testing is over and you’re not sure what else to do. Use this time to have some fun, teach your students a lot of real-world skills, and be truly amazed at how awesome your students are!Ready spaghetti?Awesome! As this year-end project comes to a close, I just want you to recap and pat yourself on the back for all you and your students have accomplished: Naming a company, creating a business plan, building a brand around that business plan, creating a marketing strategy and marketing materials, creating and fulfilling various job roles, preparing and selling a product, using Scientific Method to determine a path to success. WOW! Good for you. Now it’s time to wrap it all up in a neat little bow.This WeekYour students will be looking through their data and putting together a presentation with the followingName of the Company
Summary of the business plan to include mission statement
brandboard
List of strengths of the business
list of opportunities where the business could improve
Role in the company*
Contributions made to the company
additional reflections
*As I mentioned in Week 4, it’s possible your students fulfilled different roles at different times. Have each student choose the role they feel most comfortable reporting on.
Students can present in any number of ways. They can do a classic tri-fold board, present orally, create a PowerPoint, create another portfolio, etc.
For young ones you may want to have them create a book about their experiences. They can answer the list above in sentence form. For example: My class created a company. The name of the company was ______________. We decided to sell (insert type of flowers.) As far as detailing the business plan, your students can have a page for each section and write 2-3 sentences about each section.Data CollectionHave your students draft a survey for their “customers.” If you haven’t completed your project already, they can even hand out the survey during the sale time. Customers can fill out the survey while they are at the “shop” or fill it out at home and return it to your classroom. Students will then create graphs based on some part of the data they find interesting. The data will likely be presented in bar graph or pie chart form if the sale is only one night. You may, however, have line graphs if the sale continues in the school over multiple days. Remember, your store managers will be documenting sales.Scientific MethodIf you’ve already completed the project, you will have to incorporate this into your next year-end project as you will have to have students start at the beginning. Around Week 2 or 3, once students have completed their business plan or plans, have them draft a hypothesis about the success of the business. The best way to test these hypotheses is likely the customer survey. Since you can’t create a survey for each student, I would suggest as a class that you vote on 3 hypotheses. Survey questions will reflect each hypothesis. For example, Red roses will sell better than pink roses. A survey question might be Which color of roses would you be more likely to buy? If the majority of people surveyed say red roses and the store sells more red roses than pink roses, we could assume for the purposes of the experiment that the hypothesis is true.Don’t Forget the JournalKeep in mind that your students should have been taking meticulous notes on this year-end project in their journals. As far as grading goes, you can incorporate the journal, final project, graph, and any other culminating assignments you can think of. This way your students have multiple opportunities to earn a good grade. Offer them a rubric with your expectations and grade accordingly.You and your students have accomplished so much with this little year-end project! Much better than movies right? If you are teaching Summer School, this would be a great lesson. As always, feel free to comment below with your experiences and ideas. I am so excited to see how this works for your students. Remember this is our last weekly blog post for the summer. You can see us again at the beginning of July!Have a happy rest of June!