#1 Clubs must include everyone. This was learned when Sophie told me the members of the club and it was every girl in the class except one. Not cool! Sophie was very mature and went to the other girls and advocated for the girl as did some of the other girls.
#2 Clubs including money are tricky. This club was called Cookie N' Co. Its purpose was to make and sell cookies to earn a pizza party. Then one of the other parents suggested that the girls donate a portion of their profit to a charity. It was a great idea and the girls did it, but it just wasn't anything a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds would have come up with on their own. Then in the end they all had an argument because some of them wanted to donate all the money to a local farm that had a fire and some just wanted to do a portion.
#3 Decision making as a group is difficult. The first meeting lasted hours as the girls discussed and tried to figure out how much to charge, where and how much to donate, what to call the club, what kind of cookies to make, who would advertise, where to sell the cookies (they never did decide on that one). Plus 8-9 year old girls are fickle even when a decision was made it would change several times.
#4 In order for a business plan to work you need a venue to sell your wares. The girls didn't have it for weeks so we just made dough and froze it until we could figure out how to sell the cookies.
#5 Clubs are short lived. The girls lost interest in the club so I was doing everything. I finally just baked all the cookies one night and said we were done and that if Sophie wanted to have her friends over to bake cookies for fun they were more than welcome. Really I think that is all they ever really wanted to do.
#6 Fair weather friends...there were a couple of girls who never came to the Friday meetings to make cookie dough, but when it came time to sell the cookies for real money, they were right there like they had been part of the group all along. When the money for the pizza party was collected Aaron and I encouraged Sophie to exclude those who didn't contribute (I know it contradicts # 1). I am pleased to say that Sophie didn't care, she just wanted to have fun with her friends and all were invited.
#6 Earning money is fun! After the cookies were baked I brought them to the school and the girls brought out a table and made a price list and those things sold like hot cakes. With in a few minutes the girls had $40!
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| The girls that were able to make it for the pizza party |
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| Same girls without a pizza box. We had a chinese fire drill where I pulled over and the girls had 10 seconds to throw a snowball at the windshield since they couldn't all trade seats (one was in a booster seat, another was the only one tall enough to sit in the front...) |
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