Young Entrepreneurs

Carter is in grade 5 this year and got a very exciting project this fall. (Exciting for me at least.) Everyone in his class was tasked with making something that they could sell in a craft fair. It's a formal program and after picking their craft they go through the process of market research, determining the materials they need, getting a loan from their parents to purchase those materials, designing and building their craft, creating marketing material, creating a display booth and finally spending two afternoons selling their product to unsuspecting parents and class mates.

Carter initially started with the idea of doing painted pet rocks with super hero themes. I couldn't possibly let him pick something that didn't involve something woodworking related so after tossing some ideas around we settled on painted wooden Christmas ornaments ranging from super hero badges, to emoji's to Christmas characters like snowmen and Rudolf. The ornaments were all made out of 1/8 inch baltic birch plywood and painted with enamel paint from the dollar store. I will admit I often performed the first operation of each step to show him how to do it but ultimately he did about 90% of the work by himself which included using the drill press with a hole saw for the round ornaments and the scroll saw for some of the more complicated ornaments like the classic Poo emoji wearing a Santa hat. I think he put in about 30 hours of effort over the course of six weeks and sold almost all of his product. His grand total was $90 dollars and his expenses were a year $18. A great success and a fun project for both of us. He even donated 10% of the profits to charity.