Student Store Blends Business, Birds and Big-Hearted Learning

A unique business idea devised by Heritage ECS first graders transformed the school into a storefront one night this month. In the end, their business model served both birds and people and was a culminating showcase of what they’d learned in language arts, math, science and social studies this year. 

“We had an idea of what we wanted the experience to look like, but it was critically important to us that the kids generate their own ideas and shape the final product,” said Eunice Vogelsang and Kristin Sellers, the teaching team who led the two-week project alongside four other first grade teachers. 

Staying true to the most basic requirement of any truly personalized learning experience, the teaching duo assumed the role of “facilitators.” They tapped into their lengthy study of birds per Lakota’s language arts curriculum, intersecting it with a social studies unit about needs and wants. This led to a class discussion that tackled one simple question: How can we help birds and people? 

Assuming their role as facilitators, Vogelsang and Sellers invited two key visitors into their classroom. Heritage community liaison Molly Jones first spoke with the class about four different charity organizations that help people in our community. Students went on to write their own opinion pieces about which one they supported most and why. Their next visitor was the owner of Donut Dude, who spoke with the class about what it takes to run a successful business - all while treating his audience to some delicious donuts of course! 

Together, both visits gave students a jumping off point for collaborating on their winning business idea. Each class would make a different product to serve birds’ needs with all profits of their sales going to Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a local non-profit that gifts beds to children who don’t have one of their own. 

After successfully pitching the idea to their school principal, they went to work on dreaming up their products and sourcing the materials needed to bring them to life. Collectively, the six classes produced such items as bird feeders, bird houses, bags of seed and perhaps the most innovative of them all - a colorful piece of bead art designed to hang in windows and help reduce the number one cause of bird deaths: Crashing into glass windows. Students named these bird savers “Feathered Friends.” 

They used the “Create & Imagine” portion of their new language arts lab time to actually build their products. They planned their store setup, set their costs, created order sheets, wrote letters and designed advertisements to promote their store opening to parents and staff, created checkout bags and even collaborated with the school’s PTO to facilitate a cashless payment system using their credit card system. 

“The kids had so much pride in the final product and that was our main goal all along,” said Sellers, describing the students’ excitement on the store’s opening night, where the halls were flooded with customers. In the end, the store raised nearly $1,900, enough to give 10 Lakota students a bed. 

The project was also a model exercise in marrying an age-old tradition with new curriculum expectations, explained Sellers and Vogelsang, who have ended their school year with a student-run store for years. “[The store] was something we believed strongly in, so we found a way to do it while tying in the new curriculum,” Vogelsang said.