On the last day of each term there is a market day for all the children from the junior primary through to the high school. They make all sorts of arts, crafts, food, jewellery and games, and then have a fun time selling it to parents, pre-schoolers, friends, and any willing buyers.

Set up and ready to sell

Demonstrating her cloud dough to prospective buyers

Grace wanted to make play dough, but because the idea is to enable them to prepare and sell everything as independently as possible we discussed it and decided to try making kinetic sand (play dough requires working with a hot stove). It turns out, that kinetic sand isn’t so easy to make.

Mixing sand and corn flour – that recipe just ended up giving us wet sand

To make kinetic sand properly requires the correct viscosity dimethicone (silicone oil), which we were not able to find a supplier for. After some more experiments we gave up on kinetic sand (for now), and chose something close – cloud dough.

Cloud dough is basically oil and flour, and definitely easy for Grace to make on her own – and loads of fun for Eli to play with.

Family fun making cloud dough

And lots of Eli fun playing with it

In the whole process we also worked through the costs, turnover and (potential) profit with her. Fortunately her arithmetic and money skills are good, but she still struggles to separate cash in hand (turnover) from profit – especially seen as the materials were bought on a loan from mom.

Gemma A getting her stand ready

She made 18 containers with 1kg of cloud dough each, and sold them for R20. The cost (half of which was the container) was R15/unit….and she sold them all. R10 to the school as rent for the market stand and after the cash float and loan was paid back, she made R80 profit.

Gemma M waiting for the customers to roll in

I was a bit worried she wasn’t going to sell enough at first, and that the place she had set up wasn’t getting enough foot traffic, but Grace decided to take her cloud dough out into the market and did lots of direct sales. I think persistence paid off and I thought she adapted very well to circumstances to make sure that all the cloud dough flew off the shelf. Thank you to all of you who supported Grace – may your children be enjoying their cloud dough tactile experience!

Gigi deciding whether to buy some gemstones

Tayla, Anna and Nyasha’s games stand

Getting some Squidgy love at the market

Loving the strawberry ice lolly

Grace has been asking to learn how to play chess for the last week, and we finally had some time to spend learning how to play this morning.

The face off – what will happen next?

Her ability to sponge in information, and her memory work well in her favour, but I’m still fascinated by her ability to learn, and how quickly she can pick something up that she is interested in. We only played one game, and she had lots of help, but she was able to spot that she couldn’t make certain moves, as it would place her piece in danger. By three quarters way through the game it felt like she was “getting it.” Well done my little Grace.