Service Learning Day #2

Because our class at El Sol had to cancel due to their field trip, we spent time developing activities for our future visits that should last us until the end of the year. We generated a significant amount of content by creating our own, pulling from online sources, and improving on/enhancing previous activities. They are as follows. Additionally, we restocked on supplies and purchased some new items as well.

1.) I will divide the group of children into two groups evenly down the middle without letting them pick teams.  I will then give one group 5 of a certain object, for example candies.  I will give the other group 1 of a certain object, for example a pencil.  I will tell both groups that they each need what the other has, so they must make a trade.  I will tell the pencil group to trade the pencil for no less than 4 candies and will tell the candy group to trade for no more than 2 candies.  The ideal trade is obviously not possible so the two groups will have to negotiate for a while.  I will then begin to suggest marketing strategies to each group, for example, "You need a pencil or else you won't be able to pass your test you have to take today" and "Don't you wish you had this savory candy?"  Eventually, when the kids are stuck and losing interest, I will give them new instructions that will work and they will make a deal.  Then, I will explain the significance of marketing and "selling" your product.  I will also talk about how sometimes deals that we want to make don't always work out perfectly and we need to cooperate to make something happen.


2.) Marketing Activity: Kids are all given the same item. Each has a piece of blank paper and markers etc. The goal is to design the best poster that advertises the product. 

Materials: White paper 8.5X11, Markers

3.)
Auction Activity:
1.      Ten pennies are given out to each of the students.
2.      Three sticky notes will be provided to each of the students. They will also need their own pencil/pen with which to write.
3.      Each student will randomly draw three items from a bag and write down their own prices on the sticky notes for each of their respective items 
4.      They will all post the sticky notes next to their items, thereby creating a marketplace. 
5.      Now, we go one by one for each student, auctioning off each of their items according to the starting prices they've set. 
   a.   If nobody wants to buy something, we ask the seller if they are willing to lower their price. If the seller is and nobody buys it again, the seller keeps the item.
   b.   If more than one person wants to buy it, the highest bidder gets it. 
6.      The student with the highest amount of money wins a price and the student with the biggest amount of items wins a prize.





4.) Short group discussion about finding practical ways to find job opportunities that incorporate passions. If there's time, we'll incorporate drawing and award them with candy at the end. In terms of the overall visit, we should bring back timers to make sure that each group knows exactly how much time left they have to finish their activity so nothing gets skipped. 

First El Sol Visit of 2014-2015 Academic Year!

Today, on November 19th, SEE-IT visited El Sol Academy.  We met the new class that we will be working with over the course of the next academic year. Additionally, we encountered several students whom we worked with last year to hear about their experience. Last years' students wished we were still teaching them.

All members of SEE-IT were present (Conner, Edward, James, Rafe, Harry, Bobby, Randy, Jon). We began teaching at 8 AM and taught until 9:30. Each Sage student partnered with another to conduct modules that we cycled through the El Sol students through. The El Sol students were divided into four groups, as there were four modules. 

We are meeting to debrief. We are discussing activities that the students connected to and activities they did not engage in as well. As a consequence, we are making, changing, enhancing, and designing new activities for future visits. Our day was consistently positive. The only obstacle came when we found that the teacher was out for the day. Therefore, we worked with a substitute teacher. 

Proposal

SEE IT

Sage Entrepreneurship Education, Investing in Tomorrow

Service Learning 2013-2014

Independent Project Proposal 

1.           Who are the students participating in this project?

Conner Thomas, Jon Skolnik, Randy Wang, Bobby Cohen, Edward Goul, James Kappos,  and Rafe Feffer.

2.          What is your area of interest, and why?

Entrepreneurship, finance, and business. These topics are dramatically overlooked in public schools and contributes to our country’s citizens’ growing debt and disproportionate spending habits.  We believe that if we can instill basic, fundamental concepts of ideas like saving, spending, and entrepreneurship in the minds of the children we instruct, we can have an early and vital impact on these childrens’ financial futures that will continue to serve them over the course of their lives.

3.          Who are the potential partner organizations you may utilize throughout this project?

We would like to continue to foster a strong relationship with our established partner schools, as we already have a working relationship with them, and they represent the demographic we are aiming to serve.

Throughout this year, though, we have worked exclusively with El Sol Academy.

4.          What is the specific community need(s) that will be addressed? Why do they need to be addressed?

The community we hope to impact is especially affected by a lack of education in financial concepts that would allow them to stay free of debt and the minimum wage trap. Early understanding of basic ideas like saving, for instance, could quite literally change the direction of their lives.

5.          What are possible activities/opportunities you may execute within the scope of this project?

We have developed a curriculum for the students that incorporates different elements and activities--all aimed at teaching the concepts of business. If just one of these students decides to open a small business as opposed to falling victim to poor financial habits we would consider our mission a success.

6.          What do you hope to have accomplished by March?

We hope to have instilled in our students not only a fundamental understanding of finance and entrepreneurship, but also an interest in the field. We want to teach them that helping their community and making money are not mutually exclusive, but rather, go hand in hand, as entrepreneurs are often ones that contribute the most to their communities and raise the standard of living. We know that the communities we will educate have brilliant minds that are only lacking the opportunity to succeed. We want to give them a broader awareness of the world and its opportunities.

In March, we made another trip to El Sol and presented our latest material. Our activities built upon concepts taught during previous visits. Our last trip was surely our most organized and informative, and the feedback forms, provided by the students we taught, reflected that well.

7.          How will you plan to achieve your goals? (Be as specific as possible)

•   October 30: (this needs to be fairly specific): Reconvene and discuss our general goals and philosophies with this year. Discuss how this will function in relation to our investment committee component, SLIC.

•   November 20: Start working on the curriculum that we will be using to teach the students at El Sol for site visit #1 and #2. Finish curriculum for site day #1.

•   December 11: Finish curriculum for site visit #2 and #3.

•   January 15: Site visit #1

•   February 5: Site visit #2

•   March 5: Site visit #3. Prepare for presentations as well. This is to occur throughout the month as well as on this particular day.

•   April 16 (Last SL day, presentations): Present our curriculum, site visits etc.

8.          How will you measure success?

We will measure our success by our students' interest in and reception of the topics. We hope to teach our students financial fundamentals that they can use in alignment with the pursuit of their own passions. With the grasp of a few basic concepts, they could ideally save enough money to succeed in their own business endeavors.

9.          Create a blog to report on your progress.  What is the address?

http://www.slicshs.blogspot.com

Second Visit

     We've just come back from our second visit to El Sol.  During our time in Mr. Cobos' classroom today, we once again used hands-on activities to teach the principles of entrepreneurship and business to our advanced 6th Grade students.  While during our last visit we focused on imparting a basic understanding of the meaning of entrepreneurship to our students, today we built upon the concepts that we taught last time, and focused on the applications of these principles to the students' lives.
     We used several activities over the course of the visit.  The first activity was an advertising workshop.  In this activity, students were asked to brainstorm a product or service that they believed would be useful to their classmates.  After this, they developed an advertisement and business proposal, complete with a sales pitch, slogan, and advertisement poster.  This activity allowed the students to envision how they could apply the principles they learned to their daily lives.  In a second activity, entitled supply and demand, students were given a variety of objects which were assigned different price points.  After trading with classmates for fake money and then participating in an auction, the students who had earned the most money and the students who had accumulated the most items were rewarded, mirroring the competing interests between manufacturers and consumers in the marketplace.  In a third activity, the students were challenged to, using a limited allocation of money, buy supplies from a "store", which they would then use to construct a tower.  Students who constructed the highest tower were rewarded.  The final activity that students participated in was focused on planning the future.  In this activity, students were given a chance to express their goals for the future, and there "dreams", and then were guided through a discussion involving the steps that would set them on the path to those dreams.  This activity allowed students to think critically in a broader sense, and synthesized knowledge gained throughout all the other activities.
     Overall, we believe this visit was highly successful, even more so than the previous visit.  Students were engaged and interested in the activity, and it was amazing to see the student's responses to the questions that we asked at the end of the class.  One student talked about her plans on starting a brownie-cookie business to sell to her classmates, and another spoke of his plans on developing a focused soccer practice schedule to further develop his skills.  We're highly pleased with the results of this program, and look forward to seeing how the students develop in the future!

Visit 2 Preparation

     Over the past few weeks since our last visit to El Sol Science and Arts Academy in Santa Ana, we've been in the process of preparing a new set of activities to be used in our next visit to the school, and we look forward to visiting the school again.  Although only a few weeks have passed since our last visit to the school, we are confident that the preparation we have put in will allow our next visit to the school to be even more successful than the previous one was.
    During the next visit and the subsequent visits to the school, we continue to seek to incorporate our mission statement into our curriculum, "promote the entrepreneurial spirit and stimulate inherent intellectual creativity in young students."  We believe that entrepreneurship can serve as a framework that allows students, besides gaining valuable entrepreneurial skills and knowledge, to develop their creativity and problem-solving skills that they can ultimately apply throughout their lives, no matter what they decide to do.
     We look forward to our next visit!

Visit 1

     

      Checking in after a highly successful visit working with the 6th graders in Mr. Cobos' class in El Sol.  Today, we made our first visit to El Sol Academy in Santa Ana. We taught entrepreneurship through a rotation of 6 activities, each designed to be relavent to a different aspect of entrepreneurship: negotiation, product design, product improvement, investment, and sales pitches.  At the end of the visit, we recieved feedback from the students in the form of anonymous surveys.  We're pleased with the results, and look forward to incorporating the constructive feedback from the surveys into our lessons in the future. Overall, we consider the visit highly successful, and we're excited as to what we can accomplish in the future.

Pre-Visit

     We've just finished cheking in with our Service Learning advisors, and we're excited to begin the day.  Today, we will perform our first visit to El Sol Academy in Santa Ana.  We will be working with the 24 6th grade accelerated students in Mr. Cobos' classroom, and will be guiding them through activities related to entrepreneurship and business.  We aim to teach our students not only the basics of what it means to be an entrepreneur, but also teach them to think about how to apply their passions and combine them with these skills to impact their community.

Post-Meeting Report

     Today we met for the first time with the teacher at El Sol Academy in Santa Ana after school.  Mrs. Zavala was very interested and receptive to our plans and ideas, and was excited to learn more about the program.  After looking over our syllabus and the other materials we had prepared,  Mrs. Zavala spoke with us about our future plans for the group.  She was very confident in the potential of this group, and was not only eager to speak with us about her students, but also eager to spread the word of our group to other teachers at the school who might be interested.
     We look forward to further tailoring our syllabus and curriculum to fit her individual needs, and also to keeping in contact with her over the next few weeks.  We're very excited about the future of this group, and we can't wait to begin our service visits at El Sol!

Activities

Here are the first few of the activities that we have formulated for our group

Activity Examples

1.   Supply and Demand

Group A

You have a pencil and need candy.  You have to trade your pencil for candy.  DO NOT TRADE YOUR PENCIL FOR LESS THAN 10 CANDIES.

Group B

You have 15 candies, but you need a pencil.  You have to trade some candies for a pencil.  DO NOT TRADE MORE THAN 5 CANDIES FOR THE PENCIL.  

2.   Product Design and Innovation

Students will be given an object(s), a time limit, and told to create something from it. This is basic activity that spurs excellent results and students enjoy.

3.   Sell me this pen

In groups of twos, students will engage each other trying their ability to “sell” their partner a given item. I.e. pen, pencil, binder, etc. Whoever thinks they have the best sales pitch can present to the class if they so choose.

4.   Marshmallow Activity

The purpose of the game is to teach the students the power of patience and conserving. The ability to be patient and conserve is valuable and in all realms of the business and entrepreneurial world.

Everyone in the class receives a marshmallow.

For every minute they wait, they will get double the current amount of marshmallows they have. (1 -> 2, 2 -> 4, 4 -> 8) At 8, we will stop.

The “Call” Option. For the last minute, the students will be presented an option. If nobody eats any of their marshmallows during the last minute, everyone will end up with half what they currently have. Any single student can decide to eat all of his marshmallows, but then nobody else will be allowed to eat theirs. Address that, in the end, all students might not be left with any marshmallows. This will further their temptation to eat them.

5. Budgeting activity

This activity involves building a tower from two types of blocks, each with a different price.

Students are given a starting amount of imaginary money, let’s say $100 dollars. With this budget they may then buy a certain amount of building blocks for their tower. One type, a domino, will cost $5. The other, a jenga block, will cost $10. The goal of this activity is for students to create

the highest free-standing tower while staying within their budget. To add another aspect to the game, students may be able to make deals with other students and alter prices as they come up with creative solutions.

6. Creation activity

Students must identify a problem with a toy, utensil, appliance, etc. of their choosing. They will list all of the problems with this particular object, and propose ideas for either a way to improve this object or a completely new object that fills the same niche as the previous object, but better. After all students have come up with individual ideas, they may collaborate and form groups. Students develop a prototype (drawing, sculpture) and hypothesize the materials needed to create this new invention, and then develop a pitch (poster possibly)  to present to a supervisor (a good way to incorporate art or other visual media into our presentation). The most important part of this activity is to get the students to recognize things that are wrong with the things they use on a regular basis.

Mission Statement

The following is our service group's Mission Statement

Entrepreneurship is not

-Magic

-Mysterious

It is a skill and can be learned

What are entrepreneurs?

They are people who see opportunities where others see chaos and confusion.

What do they do?

- Entrepreneurs are always looking for something new.

- Entrepreneurs have the ability to think big.

- Entrepreneurs try to do the impossible.

- Entrepreneurs love innovation.

- Entrepreneurs are tolerant of people who make mistakes.

What is good about being an entrepreneur?

You…

- Do what you enjoy

- Help your community

- Can even make a bit of money

Purpose: To promote the entrepreneurial spirit and stimulate inherent intellectual creativity in young students.