Final project by Year 11I students as they learn about business planning for charities, fair trade and toy safety
Final project by Year 11I students as they learn about business planning for charities, fair trade and toy safety
The end result of Year Group 11I’s year long project is the charity sale of 190 adorable teddy bears sporting official DCIS uniforms.
These bears are special because:
Bears will be on sale on the front steps every morning before school from Monday 19th June. They will sell for $25 each with all proceeds going to Orbis International and Food From The Heart.
Here is the backstory to these teddy bears, as told by our own Year 11 Teacher, Rhona Chapman:
Because DCIS is an international school, we are always seeing people come and go, we make new friends and say goodbye to other friends. With this in mind, we thought it would be nice to design a keepsake, a remembrance of the community feeling here at Dover Court. So after a few round table discussions around cuteness and what would best fit the bill, we started researching teddy bears.
Our search started in Singapore but after a few fruitless bear hunts we still couldn’t find a bear with the right degree of cuteness, so we widened our search to an international level with the help of Google.
However, we did not want just any old bear, even if s/he were cute: we needed our bear to be safe for all ages and to have been made in a socially responsible manner. We just couldn’t ‘bear’ to think of our students with a stuffed toy that had been made by people whose human rights had not been respected, or one that had been made with unsafe materials. For a while it seemed un-bear-ably difficult, as so many leads felt more like a wild goose chase instead of a bear hunt. But in the end patience was rewarded and we found a bear with the perfect blend of cuteness and safety while being made with kindness. The Dover teddy (AKA DC Bear) comes with a label that shows he/she is made responsibly and from safe materials.
So, the DC Bear was born. But that is not the end of the story as the money from the bears will be sent to two charities - Orbis, the seeing eye doctors, and Foodfromtheheart.org which is a Singapore charity that distributes food to needy people in Singapore.
We started this project wanting to know how to run a business. We made mind maps, plans, tables, meetings and spreadsheets to show how to run a business in general. The end result was amazing, as we could see our original idea come ‘alive’ in the form of the bears, and finally for the bears to raise money for charities giving people their sight and feeding hungry children before they go to school.
Rhona Chapman
Year 11 I Class Teacher
