Podcast: Powerful Learning Through Entrepreneurial Opportunities

I have been a long-time promoter of engaging students in real-life (project-based) opportunities. That’s driven from my own experiences as a 4-H participant in my elementary and high school years and having observed teachers and students tackling powerful learning through doing live event projects. Those experiences generated my interest to learn more when I was introduced to The Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs. Leah Ellis shares how even young elementary students can learn important life skills as entrepreneurs.

Visit The Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs website here. 

Find Leah’s book, “Sparks to Stars: The Story of Astra & Zeke” here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:30.000] – Steve
Powerful learning through entrepreneurial opportunities. I’ve been a long-time promoter of engaging students in real-life, project-based opportunities. That’s driven from my own experience as a 4-H participant in my elementary and high school years, and having observed teachers and students tackle powerful learning through doing projects. I’ve recorded a number of podcast with teachers and students who tackled solving real problems, such as the fourth-graders who designed their playground so that it was accessible to students in wheelchairs. They also held events all year long to generate the funds for the design to be implemented. Those experiences generated my interest to learn more when I was introduced to an article about the Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs. Joining our podcast today is the founder of the Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs, Leah Ellis. Leah an experienced early childhood and elementary educator and the mother of four children. Welcome, Leah.

[00:01:37.280] – Leah
Hi. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:39.240] – Steve
Thank you so much for joining us. Why don’t we just jump in for a starter to work from then. Give us a little description of the Society of Childhood entrepreneurs.

[00:01:50.720] – Leah
It’s a Society of Child Entrepreneurs. We teach kids how to start and run their own businesses. But it’s not just those lemonade stands that you’re used to. I have kids that graphic designers, 3D printers. They’re really kids who have an idea and the tools to implement it. Then I teach them the skills to make sure they implement it well and it can be sustainable as they get older.

[00:02:13.520] – Steve
What led to your initial focus on students as entrepreneurs?

[00:02:18.480] – Leah
My daughter – it’s a little bit of a long story, so bear with me.

[00:02:22.920] – Steve
Go ahead. We got time.

[00:02:24.800] – Leah
Before COVID, I ran an in-home daycare, and I taught essentially an all girls engineering curriculum because that’s just how our program had fallen together. I loved it, and I loved teaching STEM to little girls and pushing these girls outside of the traditional boundaries of what they expected little girls to learn. Yes, our water bottle Rockets had lots of glitter, but they still learned about propulsion, and it was amazing. But then my house flooded, and I had to move into a hotel. You cannot run an in-home daycare out of a hotel room, so we temporarily shut down our daycare. Unfortunately, our grand reopening was March 17th, 2020. At the time, we lived in Los Angeles County, and that is the exact day that they issued the stay at home order. So we never got to reopen. And then the city that we lived in opened a free for essential workers’ childcare within walking distance of my house. So then even my tiny glimmer of hope that maybe we’ll get the essential workers went away because they had a free option less than a mile from me. That meant I needed to pivot and figure out something else to do.

[00:03:31.620] – Leah
Since I’m reasonably entrepreneurial, my husband and I had decided to start a financial coaching company together. I would watch small business trading videos and entrepreneur mom stuff, videos like that on the big TV in our living room because my husband was deployed and I was home alone with an 18-month-old and a four-year-old. Then, maybe April, May, my four-year-old looked at me and said, “Mom, I want to start a business, too.” Of course, my initial gut reaction – “Four-year-olds can’t start businesses. No.” Then she did that one word that is the top of every four-year-old’s vocabulary, that they all…it’s their immediate reaction to everything, “but why?” I had no good answer for why she couldn’t start a business. And we were trapped at home anyway. So what was the risk of experimentation? It was going to be, at the very least, a learning opportunity for her. So we sat down and we brainstormed, and she went even into some Facebook groups and had voting and polls on what name she was going to select with her business and everything. And she finally settled on, Custom Drip Art from Melody Paints. After the world reopened for COVID, Melody ended up having some opportunities to be a featured artist for some city art shows.

[00:04:45.260] – Leah
She continued doing her outreach. We were invited to our first children’s business fair, which she loved. Then we left California and we moved back home to Kansas, and I hosted a children’s business fair as an opportunity to get connected with some of the other people who were doing similar things with their kids. When I finished it, I was not nearly as satisfied as I had been at the first Children’s Business Fair because as the organizer, I realized all the things that we weren’t doing. Because we had to put on this beautiful event, the kids had all made tons of money, sold amazing things, and then they left, and there was no more learning. And that, as somebody who takes child development and education so seriously, really frustrated me because we had opened this wide door of excitement and then not used it. We created the Society of Child Entrepreneurs to take that big excitement of their first fair and then build an entire educational program around it so that they’re actually learning sustainable entrepreneurship, financial literacy, leadership skills, confidence, all of those skills that they learn as entrepreneurs while they’re still kids.

[00:05:55.700] – Steve
Could you tell us some of the projects that students have taken on as their business?

[00:06:02.860] – Leah
My favorite one is, I actually have a girl who does the plushies that she crochets, and they are so soft and so beautiful. They look amazing. I looked at her and I was like, “How do you make these? How long does this take?” She was like, “Oh, it takes an hour and a half.” I was like, “Wait, what?” I have another girl who does custom pens. I really love her pens. I have one in my desk that says, “She is fearless.” We have two young gentlemen who run 3D printing companies. I have another boy who is an avid reader and very frustrated that at 13 years old, his classmates aren’t avid readers anymore. We all know that around fourth grade, that reading for pleasure drops off. But he still really loves reading, and he wants his classmates to read with him. So he created this business called Troy’s Top 10. And if you tell him a genre that you like, he will give you books in your recommended genre that he would recommend you read next. That way, he can keep his classmates reading because they’re not reading boring books. He’s already identified the books that they’re going to be interested in.

[00:07:14.700] – Steve
Very cool.

[00:07:15.740] – Leah
Yeah, he’s a future educator. He just doesn’t know it yet.

[00:07:20.180] – Steve
[laughter] There’s a term that I use in my work with teachers that I call, “live event learning.” I use that term to describe students working on projects where there’s a real consequence for the choices that they make. There’s also some unknowns that are present. I think those are both key elements to the learning. I think it’s why extracurricular activities in schools are so often a great learning experience for students. It seems that all applies to your entrepreneurial focus.

[00:08:00.160] – Leah
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we literally put on live events open to the public where these kids have to put on their customer service hats and talk to strangers. And we don’t know how many people are going to show up. We don’t know who’s going to show up. We don’t know what they’re going to say. I had one guy tell me at a renaissance festival that he would not support our organization because he did not support child labor.

[00:08:23.227] – Steve
[laughter]

[00:08:23.560] – Leah
And the kids were like, What? I had to be like, I don’t think you understand our program. But it was a great opportunity for the kids to be like, no, this is not child labor. This is mine, and I want to do it. It’s always fun because we never know what we’re going to hear at an event, and the kids have to learn how to pivot, how to think on their feet, how to communicate.

[00:08:49.880] – Steve
Real life.

[00:08:50.500] – Leah
How not to laugh at grownups who say we don’t support child labor.

[00:08:54.380] – Steve
Yeah. I read on your website that the experience is build learners’ confidence, communication skills, and resilience as just a few of the positive traits that you mentioned. Would you expand on that a little?

[00:09:09.280] – Leah
Right. If we think about entrepreneurship as an adult, you’re the face of your company, which means you have to have great communication skills because you have to be able to identify what your company does and explain it to other people in a way that they understand. You have to have confidence to know that you’re describing it in the right way and that you are the right person to do that job. And then you have to be resilient enough to know that some days there are going to be bad sales days and you keep going anyway. All of those things still apply to my kids when they learn. One of the biggest opportunities for one of our kids to learn resilience. Actually, it’s a little bit of a sad story. We had what we thought was going to be an amazing market set up. Our city does a fall festival, and we bring in 10,000 to 15,000 people from the neighboring big city to our small town in two days. It’s a massive event. I had gotten the opportunity for our kids to be able to have booths at the event. It was free.

[00:10:09.400] – Leah
It was just for our members. We were anticipating it was going to be the biggest thing that had ever happened for our little baby organization. But at the last minute, the city moved all of the adult vendors to a different location, which meant the area where our kids were was crickets because there were no vendors around us. We were just in this empty building by ourselves. The unfortunate part of all of it was it also took place on my daughter’s 10th birthday. So on my daughter’s 10th birthday, she woke up that morning prepared to make hundreds of dollars, talk to thousands of people, and just have a blast selling her business. And over the course of the day, she probably saw three people and got four or five pity sales. And she obviously was incredibly disappointed at the end of the day. That was her birthday, and it had not gone the way she wanted it to. Then we had another fair the following month, and she came home and she was like, “okay, so these are the steps I want to take to make sure that the November fair goes better than the October fair did.”

[00:11:12.080] – Leah
How easy would a 10 years old to have been like, “That sucked. I’m never doing business again.” She’s learning that resilience of, okay, sometimes things don’t work. What do we do to make it go better next time? The November fair was a little bit better, and she did make some more sales.

[00:11:28.360] – Steve
Well, you can tell your daughter that you met a gentleman who got on an airplane in New Jersey and flew to Washington, DC, and spent a small fortune to speak at a conference, and no one came to his session. [laughter]

[00:11:50.580] – Steve
I know her entrepreneurial pain and learning from that.

[00:11:57.700] – Leah
Right. What entrepreneur doesn’t know the experience of a bad event or a bad sales day. It’s part of saying, this is a part of life. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, there’s going to be bad days in whatever you’re doing and that resilience to be able to say, what do I have ownership that I can fix to make it better? It’s not even just the resilience, but also that problem solving skills and that locus of control of what do I manage.

[00:12:26.680] – Steve
I earlier recorded a podcast with the authors of a book called, “Leaders of the Class.” They focus on schools developing leadership skills for all students. Their focus was high school and traditionally, there’s a select group of students who go through high school learning leadership skills. Their focus was on our need to greatly increase that opportunity. It strikes me that entrepreneurial approach can create a lot of those similar opportunities for kids.

[00:13:06.380] – Leah
Right. Especially because as an entrepreneur, not only are you learning to lead your business, but part of our curriculum teaches social entrepreneurship and how as an entrepreneur, you have the opportunity, and I would even say the obligation, to work on making your community a better place. In one of our books that is yet to be published, the main characters help a girl identify a field in their city – we have all those fields, and it’s like an empty field in between buildings, and it’s full of plastic bags. So how to take that field and turn it into something that the community can use. And this young entrepreneur leads the project to turn it into a community garden in a playground. Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to do those things because we already have outreach in our community. People already know us as the person who does that business. So they already understand the report. They’ve already built some relationship. They want to help us with other projects.

[00:14:00.000] – Steve
Very cool. I’m wondering how you would envision teachers making entrepreneurial opportunities for students. I know some teachers do a thing that they call a genius hour, where it gives kids a freedom and autonomy to tackle anything they want. As I was thinking about the work that you’re doing, I could envision an entrepreneurial hour a couple of times a week, falling into the schedule where kids could engage in their entrepreneurial venture.

[00:14:40.480] – Leah
Absolutely. In fact, I cheated a little bit on this one because I’m writing a curriculum. So the best way to put it in your classroom is wait 24 months for me to publish the rest of what I’ve written and then just put my curriculum in your classroom. But no, really, it’s all about just starting to ask questions and let the kids build the solutions. Tell the kids, we have this problem, how can business solve it? And then letting them slowly build businesses that solve those problems that they see in their community. And then taking those to the public and collecting money and being very proud of themselves for earning their own money. With our curriculum, it starts out very simply with, what is an entrepreneur and what does an entrepreneur do? Then by the end of the school year, they actually put on their first market where they’re selling the product that they’ve invented that school year.

[00:15:26.960] – Steve
Very cool. What’s the best way for a listener to find out more about your Society for Childhood Entrepreneurs and follow up with you personally on some questions and follow that curriculum you’re working on and the books you’re working on?

[00:15:43.600] – Leah
Our website is is soceict.org – if you follow on that, I post stuff on our blog. Then our Facebook page, the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, I post regularly in there on what the kids are doing and what’s going on. Those are the two places that you’ll catch on the quickest when new things arrive. Then my email address is just leah@soceict.org. You can always email me and be like, I need to know more. Then, this is new – I didn’t tell you about this Last time we talked because it wasn’t a thing yet. But the first Astra and Zeke book is now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can actually buy the first book in the series and at least meet the characters.

[00:16:25.960] – Steve
Tell us a little bit about that book.

[00:16:28.360] – Leah
Astra and Zeke the mascots that I created for the Society of Child Entrepreneurs. One thing that we talk about when we’re the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, it can’t just be adults telling them what to do because that’s just bossing them around, which is what we’re trying to avoid. So I created Astra and Zeke, 10 and 12-year-old business coaches who work together to teach entrepreneurship to kids. They’re the staple of our curriculum. They’re the staple of most of our programming. And so this first book is the story of who they are, how they meet, and the origin of their business coaching company, “From Sparks to Stars.”

[00:17:05.340] – Steve
Well, terrific. We’ll put the links to those things in the lead-in to this podcast, make it easy for folks to find.

[00:17:12.160] – Leah
Also, I got incredibly lucky. I have the best illustrator, so the book is just beautiful.

[00:17:17.500] – Steve
Terrific. Terrific. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:17:20.820] – Leah
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:17:24.060] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.