Spring Sale Fundraiser Success

If your school is like mine, money is in short supply and so are resources. Teachers are constantly supplementing classrooms from their own pockets so that the children can have creative resources and hands on materials. Now, even the cost of buses to go on field trips is becoming very high.
I really wanted to do something different and special with my class before the end of the year, so I decided that it would be fun to travel to another place where many students may not have been before.
During Spring Break, I had the good fortune to spend a day and a half in an elementary school in Port Hardy, a town at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I met some wonderful teachers and students and I also got to see a student of mine who moved up there at Christmastime.
I thought it would be fun for my class to get to know her new class and the class next door. What better way than to actually go there. We are studying about our country, so I wanted to start with the island we live on. Most children have been down island to Nanaimo or Victoria, but not many have been up to the north end of the island. I have lived in Campbell River for many years, and last month was the first time I had visited this town.
I checked into getting a bus and discovered that it would be very expensive. I didn't want to ask parents to pay out large amounts of money, so I had to get creative. Then I had a lightbulb moment. We had just finished working on our money unit. Instead of doing a mock sale in my class with the school play money, why not do a real sale and earn money.
Last year, the older students in the school did a Young Entrepreneurs sale. When I saw the items they were selling, I started to think about how this could be modified and used in a smaller dose with my Grade threes. I promptly forgot about it until about 2 weeks ago.  So, this is how our Spring Sale Fundraiser event began.

Check out our 9 products that we made for sale!

We raised $325.00 and we even had to take orders for our stress balloons because they were so popular that we ran out of them.

If you need to raise money and you want it to be child driven, this is a fantastic way of doing it. The kids were so motivated, and they also learned first hand how to earn money in the real world. Check out the DIY blog posts for directions on how to create some of these projects.