Speaking in Commercials for a "marketing firm"
Submitted by: Don Stanner
The unit is a cross curricular unit. We called it the
"boat unit." Basically, students constructed/manufactured boats,
marketed them and created a business. They established a company (created a name
and logo) and bought materials and received income for a job well done (they had
to create a ledger and get it checked everyday...really at the end of the unit).
Students constructed a sales booth, marketing brochures and created commercials
They could select from a pool of commercial ideas (Radio Ads, TV or print). By
the end of the week the students had a boat show for our 6th grade (We even had
an drawing to determine which booth and boat was the best....but we simply
adjusted the score if it was a bit biased).
The unit was applied to the 8th grade level, but I think it could be modified for 5th/6th grade level by simplifying the Economic Factors and boat construction method (we constructed power boats, but sailing vessels would work I suppose)
We raced our boats...the students loved it!
Our Faculty boat....won (and we constructed our boat in about 3 hours as opposed to the week we gave our students)!
How did we structure this? Well, the students were assigned to a specific room for 4 periods out of 6 everyday for a week. When it came time to transfer classes it was the teachers who rotated to each class room and offered ideas and expertise for 1 hour everyday (this way we didn't have the same students all day or have to try to answer a question that we were clueless about).
I think this idea would work with a pool of one grade level (thus allowing our student exposure to different teachers within their school), each becoming an expert in a specific area (Math for the Economics, Science for construction, English/Language Arts of the Communications and History/Social Studies could either free lance or in my case I carried the Economic portion of our unit.