Advertising

Thanks for the advice Leslee! I went ahead with the advertising and I am glad that I did. I was a little worried that we would run out of time for everything. Until I remembered that it will be OK to carry on into Term 2 with this, and it really won't matter if it takes all of next term because what we are going to do is quite a big task. The children don't know that yet because I still haven't given them the commission.
Maybe they can use the holidays to do a bit of research hehe :)
Now I am getting ahead of myself and the holidays are far away so I shall get back on track...
We wanted to promote our new fancy bookshop where people can come to buy our amazing books that we have written and published. And everyone will want our books because we are famous. During a meeting in the "lounge" we decided to have a grand opening with a special promotion. We talked about how much of a discount we could offer with our opening sale and did a bit of working out with prices (this was actually quite good because they were using percentages and working out amounts for real) and arrived at a 20% discount on all books for 1 week only. Some people wanted only 10% when they realised how much 20% was, but then we looked at our mission statement again and remembered that we wanted to encourage children to read. Our business may become less concerned about profit as we go. I know this wouldn't apply in the real world, but as this is a pretend business, and we are pretend rich already, it's nice that they want to get kids to be enthusiastic about reading, and that is real.
So we recorded ideas for ways to promote our sale in our "business diaries" and as different people wanted to advertise in different ways, they formed their own little groups and created their ads.
Advertising could be a commission for the future, I was playing with that idea before I came up with the one I have now, and I reckon it would be really awesome.

A brochure, includes free bookmark!

A radio advertisement. This group used Garageband, lots of learning took place, from changing the settings to use the microphone, to adding background music. Great results, and they now understand the importance of writing a script to follow too!

This wonderful design is the one that will go on the backs of buses. Yes, they thought of that themselves.

A TV advertisement. It was recorded with the flip camera, but they acted it out for their "colleagues" as well.

Another TV ad, this group used Hyperstudio to create an animated advertisement. You can see the concentration on their faces!

We also had our EMR trip to the Reotahi Marine Reserve on Monday, the class all got to go snorkeling and hiking and took part in the Marine Metre Squared project (where you count all the creatures on the beach in a square metre and enter the data online). It was a very well organised day with a superb facilitator running the programme, and fabulous parents supporting us. Now we are really, really ready for our commission!

Heading out for a snorkel!

Identifying and counting the marine life