Having a student business has SO MANY benefits. Depending on what your product or service is, you have the opportunity to practice independence, money math, cooking, responsibility, and so much more! In this series, various guest bloggers (teachers & special educators) will share their tried and true experience of running a student business for special education students. Hopefully, these posts will give you some great ideas or inspire you to start a classroom business of your own to teach students valuable vocational & life skills! Up next is a business making and selling fall decor pumpkins out of toilet paper!
About the Business:
I wanted a task that was easy enough for my learners with fine motor difficulties to do so that the process of making the product was as authentic as possible. We came across these cute toilet paper pumpkins on Pinterest.
Student Tasks:
- Shopping for supplies
- Cutting material
- Cutting/Separating leaf stems
- Rolling/crunching paper stems
- Hot glue gun
- Wrapping toilet paper in fabric
- Taking pre-orders
- Handling money
- Inventory
- Taking orders (at the booth)
Staff & Student Time Commitment:
Time commitment will depend on your student’s abilities and how you divide the tasks (doing an assembly line vs. one student at each step). This business is great for Halloween or near Thanksgiving so we picked one date that we would deliver pre-ordered pumpkins by. Depending on how you choose to take pre-orders (online form vs. go to each staff/class and take orders on a clipboard) will determine how much time you spend on pre-orders. Getting pre-orders helped us with being able to determine how much time we could spend each day/week on making the pumpkins. On average we would 1-2 hours a week making the pumpkins. We made extras to sell at a booth after we delivered pre-orders. We spent about 2 hours at the booth.
Supplies:
- Variety of fall/Halloween fabric designs
- We shopped for fabrics that were on sale to help save money
- Size of fabric per pumpkin depends on the thickness of the toilet paper roll, but on average it was around 18 square inch
- Brown construction paper (for stems)
- Fall leaf bouquets
- You can wait for a sale at Michaels or you can find some at Dollar Tree as well.
- Hot glue gun
- Toilet paper rolls
- We were able to get some by asking parents for donations
The price that we sold these pumpkins at were $5, but the price you choose will greatly depend on how much you spend on supplies (you have to make a profit right!?). If you are able to get some supplies donated and find supplies like the fabric on sale, it will greatly affect what you can charge per pumpkin. We also offered a discount to customers who purchased multiple pumpkins.
Thanks for reading!
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