Baby gets ready for enterpreneur day

Enterpreneur day is coming up soon at my 10-year old daughter's school, and I'm helping her get ready for it this weekend.

As part of the class project, each child has to develop a basic business plan - that is, decide on their product offering, find out where they can buy the products at reasonable cost, get funding from parents to buy the products and take all the receipts for purchases associated with the business to class for consolidation.

They also have to pay for the stall the school provides and make posters to draw potential buyers to their stall. After the event, the kids are to donate 10% of their takings to charity, and the rest of the money must go into their savings account. Homework this week was: open a bank account if you don't have one.

The project is a step-up for Baby and her class. In the past couple of years, they had a joint class stall manned by parents on enterpreneur day. And they never had to worry about operational costs and whether the venture was profitable.

But now they will have to reconcile all the expenses, man the stall on the day and give the right change to customers. Parents are supposed to only supposed to assist, not take the project over.

I like the initiative, because it helps the kids learn to take responsbility for their own money, and to understand the value of each rand they get.

The parents' most important task is to invite lots of friends and family to attend the event, which has a fair-like quality and you can wander around to get all sorts of cheap stuff you never thought you needed.

But the kids are very innovative in their product offerings, and previously I bought some seriously nice mugs from one of the kids. The mugs were very popular as birthday presents.