In the fall of 2000, when my two oldest boys were 9 and 7, they started a business they called, "Micha's Marvelous Munchies and Terran's Terrific Treats".

All my children, but Terran especially just love to bake and he really enjoyed having an excuse to make cookies every day. Micha enjoyed the real-life math he got to do as well. It was a wonderful educational experience on top of getting to earn a little money.

We started by making an ingredient list for several kinds of cookies the boys hoped to make. We took the list to the grocery store and wrote down the prices for each one. Then we looked at the nutrition information on the packages to figure out how much was in each package. For instance, the four pound bag of sugar said it contained 567 1tsp servings! Micha had to figure out how many teaspoons were in a quarter cup - 3 teaspoons in each Tablespoon and 4 Tablespoons in each quarter cup, meant there were 12 teaspoons in each quarter cup. So we divided 567 by 12 to find out how many quarter cups of sugar were in the bag. This brought in a review on rounding. 47.25 is rounded down to 47 quarter cups. Then he had to find out how much each of those quarter cups of sugar cost. He divided the cost of the bag - $1.49 by 47 and got .03, so each quarter cup must cost 3 cents. Then he figured he needed 3/4 cup in each batch of cookies, so the total sugar cost was 9 cents. He did this with every ingredient over a few days until he had figured a total cost for the whole batch of cookies. If I remember right, the cost for a batch of chocolate chip cookies was $1.18.

Next, they determined how many cookies were in a batch. Of course, this required making - and eating - a batch of cookies. Keeping the cookies approximately 3 - 4 inches in diameter, they were able to get two dozen cookies, plus a small amount of cookie dough that found its way into their tummies uncooked. Micha divided the cost of the batch of cookies by 24 and got a cost of .049, or approximately 5 cents per cookie. So, if they sold their cookies for 25 cents a piece - not an exorbitant price - they would get a profit of 20 cents per cookie - not bad!

They were in business! Each afternoon they set up their folding table at the curb in front of our house. The school buses let the kids off right across the street, so there was a built in market for their cookies, and at least a few of those kids came over every afternoon to check out the special of the day.

As the days went on, Micha's math moved to keeping the books for their business. They started out with a $9.00 loan from me, which they quickly repaid. Micha would subtract their cost, which they paid me each day for their ingredients and add the total number of cookies they sold times 25 cents. They considered the cost of extra advertising, and rejected that idea. As it turned out, word-of-mouth worked so well that they ended up being visited by a reporter from the local newspaper and they got their picture in the paper!

I was proud that they had the self discipline to leave the money in the business through that whole season. When snow arrived and it was too cold to sit outside selling cookies, they closed business until spring. When they divided the money in the cash box, they each had more than $10. A jackpot for a 9 and 7 year old, and of course it was off to the toy store for transformers.

The best thing about allowing my children to do this, was seeing the wheels in their head turning toward more business ideas for the future. It was a wonderful way to teach math - both for Micha, who kept the books, and for Terran, who worked with the fractions in the baking department. Who needs Saxon? ;) So, encourage your kids. You just never know where it might lead!

--you can see the picture that was in the paper at http://www.geocities.com/kaetherhome/kids.html---