How I started a small business with my fourth graders

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 08:49 pm

In my last month of teaching before I nonrenewed my contract, I started a small business project with my fourth-graders.

How I started teaching my students about business

They were an entrepreneurial bunch. I was an entrepreneurial teacher.

In class, we had been discussing ways to reuse materials. I also was planning to teach an upcoming economics unit. The ideas morphed into repurposing glass jars into decorated vases and selling them. After considering different repurposed products, we settled on the idea of vases. I made a prototype and taught them the creation process, and the students began to take on production.

For weeks, we collected and removed labels from used pasta sauce jars and pickle jars. We painted the jars with foam brushes and used jute string and wooden beads as additional embellishments. Once we stocked up an inventory of at least 20 products, I divided the students into teams to take care of the rest of the sales process. We had an advertising team creating eye-catching posters. We had students running the numbers– calculating the cost of materials and coming up with prices. Another team helped create an order form for customers to complete.

Right before Mother’s Day, I put the ads and info out there for our vases including a simple flower arrangement– just on my personal Facebook page– and we got an interested customer. And then a few more orders came rolling in after that.

I had one keen student in particular that found an invoice template online and she began expertly sending bills to the customers along with professionally worded follow-up emails!

We secured our largest sale from our principal, who sought to purchase the vases, with flowers, in bulk for the teachers for Teacher Appreciation Day.

This behemoth sale injected an explosion of demand into our teeny classroom shop, and we had to craft more products. We worked diligently the days before our delivery date. The students were so persistent and proud of their work! After one week of continued effort and dedicating half the room to glass jars and paints and decorations, the students had completed at least 70 additional vases.

After school the day before delivery, I embarked on assembling the fresh blooms. Our nearby grocery store gave me a discount after I explained our project. I gathered and mixed bouquets of sunflowers, alstroemeria, baby’s breath, and some greens.

I sat on my classroom floor noticing the sun duck lower and lower through my curtained window with the flowers splayed all around me, trimming stems and fitting them into the vases.

My students reveled in the satisfaction of delivering quality products

On the delivery date, the students were all eager to pass out their creations. The principal had given us the green light to give the vases out directly to the staff members. As a class, we went together to deliver the first two– the teachers seemed pleasantly surprised, grinning wide at our cart full of the selections.

There were many more staff members to disperse the gifts to, so I sent the students in groups to shuffle the cart of vases down door to door. Each and every one of my fourth graders insisted on helping with the distribution, so we switched student delivery groups every few teachers.

We thanked our customers, especially our principal for her generously large order. We sent out customer and teacher surveys and received many helpful and positive responses about our product.

Once we received our payments, factoring out the cost of materials, we were ready to calculate our profit!

How my class spent the profit

We used our profit for a field trip at a nearby family-owned ice cream and coffee shop. Two sisters had just opened up their brick-and-mortar shop near the school that spring. They allowed us to interview them about their business on Zoom. When we finally got to spend our earnings at the shop, I swear it made the ice cream sweeter having that connection between our small business and theirs.

It was the best feeling to see my students so excited and invested in this project. They had a hand in the development from beginning to end, and it was truly a life experience they could bring with them into future endeavors.

A rewarding, real-life lesson in collaboration and economics

This tops the list of my favorite teaching memories– and, honestly, creating units and projects like this are my teaching heartbeat. If anything could get me back in the classroom, it’d be this. The soaring, ecstatic feeling of developing a unit from the ground up that gives my students agency, crucial life knowledge, and huge bandwidth for cooperation and creativity is a truly lifegiving feature of the field that should not be neglected.

A common criticism of our modern school systems is that there is little time or effort devoted to giving our students valuable real-world experiences. I think this unit was a great attempt at that: we broke up the giant task of creating a product and business from beginning to end, with its interworking parts. Students filled different roles, each contributing to the progress of the business. These fourth graders got to see (at least in this example) what was necessary to complete the task, how collaborating enhanced the outcomes, and the payoff of their hard work.

I’d encourage any educators to incorporate engaging real-world projects like this– it may become one of your (and your students’!) favorite classroom memories.

The soaring, ecstatic feeling of developing a unit from the ground up that gives my students agency, crucial life knowledge, and huge bandwidth for cooperation and creativity is a truly lifegiving feature of the field that should not be neglected.

Charmaine, Chocolate for the Teach

What about you? Do you have any memorable teaching projects or units you developed? Do you also enjoy the creative process of making these lessons? Let me know in the comments!