The Western Cape Education Department, the Rotary Club of Newlands and DBE-E3 collaborated to offer teachers support in the planning and implementation of a Grade 7 Market Day.
Michelle Nel, a Rotary mentor at Silverleaf Primary School in Dunoon, Cape Town, shares her story:
“I wanted to provide my feedback on the Rotary DBE-E3 Entrepreneurship Project with Silverleaf School.
I originally joined the Rotary project as I am a keen business woman and believe that teaching entrepreneurship thinking at junior school will promote critical problem-solving, independent thinking and empowerment of our youth. I particularly liked how this initiative used Project-Based Learning as its foundation. As can be seen from this method being used across the globe to revolutionise schooling, it focuses on imparting practical knowledge to all the children in an inclusive way, versus excluding those children who perhaps struggle with theory-based learning only.
I was blessed to be assigned Silverleaf School in Dunoon as my Mentorship Partner. The school Principal, Nomathemba Vumazonke, and her Grade 7 Entrepreneurship Teachers were particularly committed to the project and very enthusiastic about the benefits it brought the children. They appreciated the practical knowledge it gave on how to problem-solve, come up with creative ideas, plan, work in a team, manage finances, advertise their offerings, build influence, meet commitments and more. The teachers also mentioned that this practical approach helped the children who perhaps struggled in the theory-only subjects to excel, shine and lead.
This school is situated in one of the harsher environments and is a non-fee paying school with very little financial resources available to it or the children who attend there. The teachers and the children did not have capital, so they approached the parents with a proposal: If the parents could provide the start-up capital for the Market Day for each of the teams, the profit from the day would be used to fund the Grade 7 Farewell, thereby saving the parents funds in the long run. The parents were mostly supportive and provided the children with some start-up capital. The school then decided to combine Market Day with its usual Heritage Day celebration so it could combine the funds for both.
The entire school was fully committed behind this initiative, and a mentorship teacher was assigned to each project team to help them. What a great competition it became! They had such creative ideas, such as renting a jumping castle on the day, and charging an entrance fee. They even had movie screenings, using a classroom and projector to screen movies for different age groups. They sold hot dogs, toys, yoghurts and breakfast buns; one project team even brought a braai and made fresh braaied meat on the day! They created a competition score sheet and the winning teams were sponsored small prizes for certain categories like most creative idea or highest profit made.
The Market Day was a great success, with all the project teams making a decent profit and thereby fully funding the Grade 7 Farewell, and allowing the children to go to an outing at the Water Park as well!
In a follow-up discussion with the Principal and Teachers, they again attested to the great success and benefit of this initiative. It not only provided a great project for the community to get fully behind, but the school will now be implementing it every year for its Heritage Day celebration. It also provided the Grade 7s with practical knowledge, and spotlighted the children who perhaps were doing badly in other theory subjects, but excelled in this practical environment. This has helped the school secure them places in a trade school for next year to help them pursue more practical careers. The event gave all the children confidence and empowered them in their own entrepreneurship skills!
I had great fun with this project and learnt a lot about collaboration and community connection from the amazing leadership at this school!”
DBE-E3 values the opportunity to collaborate with Rotary to support entrepreneurship amongst youth.
