Kids Biz Club is an 8-week 16 session course created by SAVENW.org to help local Fifth Graders learn how to start their own business. Topics include creating a business budget, a business plan and a business website.
This Spring, we had the opportunity to provide this course to students in an After-School Program at Alderwood Elementary School in Bellingham, WA. Each student was provided with a laptop to use during the course, a USB drive to save their work and a course notebook. Then their work began. The first lessons were about business planning concepts: How to choose a business, how to estimate costs, how to set pricing, the difference between a service, a product or a knowledge-based business.
Then we took a day to learn from local business manager, John “Westy” Westerfield, of Yeager’s Sporting Goods. The class explored coming to a net profit, and the differences between owners, managers, and employees. We wish to thank Westy for sharing his knowledge with the class and will be sure to say “Hi,” next time we are in his store.
With a business plan forming we moved on to the technical aspects of website design, beginning with the basics of file management.
While the course has very challenging goals, every student was able to finish their own business website – created from scratch using HTML and CSS. Each student customized their website with unique images, font colors and background colors.
Businesses chosen by the students included:
A website to get funding to help homeless dogs and cats get food and shelter.
A Horse Stable website to provide shelter for horses.
A website to offer people an Ad Free version of YouTube.
A website to offer cool haircuts.
A website to teach people how to play kickball.
A website offering information on the latest Games.
A website on learning gymnastics.
A website offering reviews of famous musicals.
Here is an image of Maggie’s “Horse Stable” website:
Here is part of Shaylee’s “Help Animals” website:
This is an image of the “Horse Stable” website’s HTML and CSS code in the Bluefish Web Editor:
Each website was viewed on last class day, and everyone shared their thoughts on each of the student’s websites. The conversation ranged from color choices, name choices, websites which had a call to action component and whether the prices were set at a point that a profit could be made.
As students received their Certificates of Completion from SAVE President Kris Halterman, and asked what they liked most about the course and where we could make improvements.
The students thanked us for having the confidence in them to teach them a skill that is normally only taught to older students. They liked the tech portion of the course especially learning how to use a screen capture tool to capture and save images. They also liked learning how to use the Bluefish web editor to create their website. Finally, they liked the fact that they were each given a USB drive in order to save their website projects so that they can continue to work on them even after the course is over.
Every student worked hard reading by using their course notebook, watching videos on YouTube. and completing all the course activities. They were all very proud of their websites.
We want to congratulate all these students for a job well done!
SAVE will be offering our Kids Biz Club course again this Summer and coming Fall. If you have a student, age 10 to 16, who would like a chance to learn these skills, or if you would like to help us offer this course at your local school, please email or call us; we’ll provide you with the details of our upcoming courses.
You can also find out more about this program and the skills we cover by going to our Kids Biz Club website at this link: https://kidsbizclub.org/
