Students test entrepreneurial skills
Published 4:00 am Friday, January 25, 2013
REDMOND — About 90 Redmond fourth- and fifth-graders woke up Thursday morning, put on their suits and prepared to face a day of tough sales.
“It’s a great idea to get kids thinking about business and diverse ways to help their community,” Megan Myers, a fifth-grade teacher at Vern Patrick Elementary, said. “They’ve come up with some amazing ideas that you wouldn’t ever think of.”
The Vern Patrick Elementary School Business Fair on Thursday was the culmination of a monthlong business lesson about finance and how businesses operate. Each fourth- and fifth-grade student at the school spent the month working on a business proposal that included the logistics of how they planned to fund their business and how they would attract customers.
“I learned that you have to invest a lot of money to buy stuff for a business,” fifth-grader Javier Medina Rodriguez, 10, said. “You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it and what people like.”
Javier decided to create a hypothetical business revolving around baking and selling sponge cakes. He was inspired to base his project on the cakes after his grandmother made them for him.
“They tasted good and they were easy to make,” Javier said. “And I thought other people would enjoy them too.”
Javier created a tri-fold poster board to display his business strategy. He said he would start out making the sponge cakes at home and delivering them to local businesses at lunchtime. He also planned on giving customers free samples to hook them.
This is the second year that the fourth- and fifth-grade teachers have held the entrepreneurial fair as a way to teach students about how businesses work.
Myers said an added benefit of the fair is that students are able to take what they’ve learned and apply it to real-life endeavors. In fact, one of her students took that entrepreneurial spirit to heart during last year’s business fair and started her own lemonade stand over the summer to pay for her ticket to the Deschutes County Fair.
“It (last year’s business fair) gave me the idea that I could earn money,” Cristina Farfan, 11, said.
Cristina ended up making $50 with her lemonade stand. At this year’s business fair, she proposed a business idea for a dog-walking business, something she could see herself doing in the future.
Ariel Sheets, 11, came up with an idea that would both make money and improve other students’ health. She built her business proposal around the idea that there are no gyms for kids her age. She said it’s unfair that a lot of gyms don’t let anyone under 16 years old in, and that having a gym just for kids would help them exercise more and become healthier.
For many of the students, one of the most thrilling aspects of the event was that they got to pitch their business proposals to their parents and family members.
“You can just see their little minds going to work,” Lisa Salinas, a grandparent of one of the students, said. “It’s preparing them for the future in a big way and broadening their horizons.”