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Rossland Summit School students learn entrepreneurial skills

Students at Rossland Summit School have been learning to be entrepreneurs.
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Jace Benner sold stress balls and Alexander Bertelsen sold fire starting kits to take camping. (Chelsea Novak/Rossland News)

Students at Rossland Summit School have been learning to be entrepreneurs.

As part of the financial literacy requirements in the new B.C. curriculum, Grade 4, 5 and 6 students in Bridget O’Malley and Matthias Starzner’s classes sold handmade goods at their Entrepreneur Fair last Thursday.

“This was a creative way to tackle that part of the curriculum,” said O’Malley.

Students came up with handmade or repurposed items to sell and then used math skills to figure out the cost of each item and how much to charge for it. (All of the items were priced somewhere between 25 cents and $3.)

Then they sold the items to their fellow students, learning how to market their products, how to sell them and how to make change.

Grade 4 student Madison Pols sold tic-tac-toe sets.

“I was looking on the internet for an idea and I saw these little rocks that had X’s and O’s on them, so I was like, ‘I like tic-tac-toe, so why don’t I make something like that,’” she explained.

She used clear glass gems and created two sets of tokens with two different patterns of paper for each tic-tac-toe bag. She then drew the grid on the bag. She priced them at $1.50 and each one cost her 70 to 80 cents to make.

Jace Benner, Grade 6, also followed his passion when creating his product. He created Squishers — stress balls made using balloons and Orbeez, water-absorbing polymers marketed to children as a toy.

“I absolutely love stress balls and I love Orbeez as well, that’s what’s inside of them,” he said. “And I love to squish Orbeez in my hand so I thought it would be awesome to put them in a balloon so they don’t make a mess.”

Students were challenged not only by the math component of the project, but also by the manufacturing.

“It was kind of hard at first to figure out all that,” said Pols, when asked about the math. “And making it was quite hard as well, but it was fun.”

It wasn’t too hard to deter her from considering a future running her own business.

“I think I might,” she said when asked if she’d like to become an entrepreneur.