Entrepreneurship Session – Fourth and Fifth Week Summary

Art – In last week’s art class, the Eagles did another round of tie-dye, and this week they’ve spent an entire class doing origami. What I love so much about Acton is how the works at the end of the class differ from one other. The idea is to give the Eagles the materials and a general framework (tie-dye/origami/watercolors on canvas/clay etc.) and from there, each Eagle takes the work to his/her direction and the product comes out accordingly and reflects his/her unique personality.

Civilization – In last week’s civilization class, we read the chapter about Shakespeare, and among other things, the Eagles read the short version of “Macbeth.” The Eagles loved the story very much and they were happy to present a short play of it. In the photo, you can see the famous scene where the king was murdered in his sleep. This week we read the chapter about the beginning of Canada, and next week we will read the last chapter and conclude the story of the middle ages.

Entrepreneurship Quest – The entrepreneurship quest has progressed a lot in the past two weeks. The Eagles worked on the formulation of their product, branding of their product, and spent a significant portion of their time on budget calculations to figure out whether their product is profitable. The specific task in this part was to dismantle the product, which they had planned, to parts from which it was made, estimate the cost of each part and then calculate what the cost of one unit of the product should be. For example, one of the Eagles plans to sell shakes at the fair. He had to estimate how much fruit and how much milk he would put into one shake cup, and then price each item to figure out what the cost of such shake cup was for him. It may seem trivial to us, but to them, it was a very complex task. To understand, for example, that one strawberry fits in one shake cup, and then to understand that strawberries are sold in pounds, and deduce from the price of one pound of strawberries, what the cost of one strawberry is. Each of the Eagles has at least two products that he/she plans to sell, so it can be understood that the financial part was quite long and required quite a lot of concentration and thinking on their part.

Writer’s Workshop – In last week’s writer’s workshop, we talked about the “writing barrier”. We watched this inspiring video together and I highly recommend it for every time you get stuck in some very difficult obstacle. The Eagles were deeply impressed by this video, and then we talked about how the video’s message can actually be implemented into our daily lives when we encounter smaller challenges. For example, we took the “writing barrier” challenge and together tried to think of how to overcome it. This week we talked about the importance of feedback and watched this excellent video. After seeing together the wonderful work done by the Eagles with concrete and constructive feedback, we thought together about the characteristics of good feedback, and the Eagles’ task this week was to give feedback to each other about the latest version of their letter to their hero.

Next week, the end of the session exhibition J