Raddish Kids changed their lesson plan format recently, from one lesson to correspond with each recipe into more of an overarching theme for each month’s package.

The change hasn’t worked well for Travis. The scope of the lesson now seems aimed at older kids, and it’s difficult to engage a first grader in the activities. This month’s theme was: what is an entrepreneur and how do you turn an idea into a business. Here’s I engaged Travis in that!

As a warm up, I asked him to imagine his favorite restaurant and describe what he liked best about it. But since we don’t go out often, he couldn’t come up with much more than that it was fancy. The idea is that kids now take their answers and design a donut shop, in conjunction with the Apple Cider Donut recipe.

We watched an online read of The Donut Chef, a cute book, but Travis couldn’t really translate that into creating a shop or flavors of donuts. Older kids can use the provided Brainstorm Bubble Map (in the shape of a donut of course) to write out ideas for a store name, logo, menu, and more.

Kids can also lay out the shape of their store using tangrams on grid paper. I simply had Travis use dollhouse furniture to create a little restaurant diorama.

We also watched a quick clip on the history of the donut, and scrolled through images of successful donut chains around the country. Big kids can learn about innovations in donuts (the cronut!), or imagine a “donut of the future”.

But I knew Travis needed something more hands on. So… we decided to open up an apple cider stand and put entrepreneurship into action.

Once we had the idea, Travis couldn’t wait for the big day. First we talked about a logo, and came up with a shiny red apple. This went on all of our cider stand materials, including an announcement poster, a price poster, and the jug we’d use to pour the cider. His color scheme was red, green, and brown.

He also watched Raddish’s provided clip of a child entrepreneur to get fired up for his own “business”.

Kids can brainstorm what snacks to sell, or even invent one. We kept it simple with store-bought packets of candy corn. Time to open up shop!

To put it simply, this was amazing. Travis was dismayed when the first few cars drove by without stopping. But once he had his first customer, the floodgates opened up. Within one hour he’d served ten customers, and we’d sold nearly all the cider.

He loved waving down cars. And little sister Veronika helped!

We finished with apple cider at home, warm with mulled spices. The perfect reward.