The Marketplace Fair makes financial learning fun by empowering elementary school students to make decisions using real money.Students bring to life a foreign marketplace in their school and earn money for personal and community benefit. By integrating strong arts-based lessons with entrepreneurship, mandated math, literacy, and social science curriculum, students build financial confidence and a foundation for future learning with their families and their communities.The 4th grade classes engage the whole school in the culminating project, the Marketplace Fair. Learning by doing – using real life situations and real money – engages all students, not just the academically inclined. The excitement and thrill of the residency led 40 families to request in-home financial literacy education. Working with the school and the parents, we have developed the following pilot programs:
Logistics: Over several weeks, children develop projects together that enable them to practice mindfulness around creative entrepreneurship (how to make the money) and generosity (how to spend it). They learn the value of fiscal responsibility, collaboration, generosity and democracy through practicing those very things. Fiscal responsibility is not something that children simply hear about. The classrooms and the Fair are places where fiscal responsibility- both individual and collective- is practiced.
Residency: The Marketplace residency is 10-16 weeks, presented jointly by a teaching artist from Marquis Studios and each classroom teacher.Elements of the curriculum are:• Students in each class borrow $100 to make a KIVA micro loan. They will repay the loan with earnings from a business they develop.
• Students vote by secret ballot for one of two African candidates to receive the KIVA micro loan and then share with the class their decision making process.
• Students study a foreign marketplace as well as their own.
• Students learn the concept of money and various ways it is used.
• Students begin to prepare to start their own business for the Marketplace Fair.
• Students design and create African inspired products to sell at the fair.
• Students make group decisions about how their products will be advertised and sold.
• The money the students make at the Marketplace Fair repays the loan they took to make the KIVA loan, while the remainder is donated to a local charity of their choosing.
• The students’ reward for money they earned and donated is an award ceremony and a pizza party.
The residency begins in the 3rd or 4th grade with the 10-16 week residency. Mini-residencies and collaborative programs with other organizations will continue the program in the 4th and 5th grade at each school. The curriculum and funding for the 4th and 5th grade programs will be determined by collaborating with our partners.