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!