Despite the snow days, this was a productive week!
E-Ship Quest
We launched the session’s “E-Ship” quest. E-ship is short for entrepreneurship. And heroes are sailing from Motivation Island to Market Island to Identity Island this week. Next week: Unit Economics and Hiring Island……
You may notice your child(ren) coming home with handouts or activities from our E-Ship quest. Depending on your child’s business idea, preparing for the business fair may require your support in the form of funding, and help purchasing supplies and materials for their product and booth.
This week, they worked on:
Motivation Island – exploring their passions and interests and what calls to them as a business idea, relative to what skills they have to employ to make that business a reality. We call this “context.” Is this the right time and am I the right person?
On Thursday, they submitted their business idea and officially applied for the business fair via the business fair website. The business fair is on Saturday, March 18, from 9am – 12pm and will serve as this session’s exhibition.
The business fair is full by the way! We have 24 entrepreneurs and entrepreneur teams from the community signed up to sell. Please spread the word to friends and family so that children have buyers! We are also advertising on Facebook, have brought in sponsors, posted fliers around town and are spreading the word to community groups. We appreciate your help!
Market Island – one step in the business-building process is market research. On Thursday, Heroes created a survey to gather information about who their target customers are. They may need your help in distributing this survey to friends and family either via email or hard copy.
Identity Island – On Friday, we began exploring behavioral economics and tied that to branding and identity. Heroes worked on designing a logo, slogan and “booth” design. The booths consist of an 8’ long table in Fellowship Hall.
Core Skills
On Friday, during morning launch, we explored “Flow.” We discussed what it is, when we’ve experienced it and strategies for getting into it, like being in our challenge zone and blocking out distractions. They were surprised to learn that a person can be “in the zone” for as long as two hours! Hmmm…..just about the same amount of time we have for core skills!
The heroes decided to implement the strategy of working in different spaces in the studio in order to block out distractions. We also talked about what apps keep them in their challenge zone and the Guides did one-on-one check-ins to help them navigate the apps and help them get to their challenge zones within them.
What a game changer in terms of concentration and focus yesterday during core skills. They are also experimenting with taking timed movement breaks or snack breaks and then getting back into flow immediately after. That’s something we will continue to explore!
Writer’s Workshop
This session the heroes are writing memoirs. With the snow days and time pressure to get businesses going, we launched Memoirs on Tuesday and will revisit them this coming week. We will tie in some art projects like self-portraits to the Memoirs genre as well.
Civilization
“Civ” encompasses history, geography, politics and economics. We are exploring the ancient world. We had fun yesterday discussing the most surprising fact we learned about our families, showing each other where we were born on the US map, then listening to a story about ancient Egypt, why nomads became farmers, and why rivers were appealing places to settle. Heroes were surprised to learn that the Nile river flows from south to north! Then we learned about why every world map is wrong because it’s impossible to translate a globe into a flat surface without some trade offs between shape and size.
Next week we will explore early writing forms and make papyrus!
