Vanier high school's split entrepreneurship class of grades 11 and 12, truly believes in experiential learning and applying practical skills to real-life situations. 

Over the past couple of weeks, the class planned a huge project that was presented to the entire school. 

The class split into groups and then each group created a small company.

The project started with the students pitching business ideas to their classmates. Students then chose what company they wanted to work with.

Then they built the products, came up with marketing and promotions strategies, and then got to sell their product to other students during their lunch hour. Each company would then donate 15%-20% of their sales to a charity or foundation of their choice.

The teacher of the class Christa Lapointe has been teaching this class and doing this project since 2009. She focuses on hands-on learning and believes it's the best way for the students to get a taste of the real world.

She says, “Ever since running this entrepreneurship class with junior achievement and experiential learning, that’s always been the focus. I’d rather them learn what business is all about by implementing it. Working together and creating that business plan, doing business meetings, connecting to the community instead of just talking about what they would do. They get to do it.”

This year's project featured 3 companies. 

Seed You Later. Which offered cards and bookmarks that were embedded with colourful wildflower seeds for people to plant after using them. The students handmade the cards using recycled paper from the school. The company decided to give 15% of its sales to the Yara Community Gardens.

The Spice Kings were selling 3 different types of cooking spices. Their King's sword steak spice was a mix of organic spices with a touch of chilli powder to put it on the spicier side of things. However, they offered the Kings Sheild which had a more peppery taste for people who don't like spicey beef. They also offered a savoury lemon pepper chicken rub. The idea of the company came from a group member's dad. The Spice Kings choose to donate 15% of their sales to the Stars Air Ambulance program.

Then there was also the Crystal-Li company that sold handmade macrame and also caged necklaces that held ethical crystals and wired crystal rings. They had several crystals for people to choose from like black onyx, amethyst, and carnelian. President of the company and grade 12 student Ann-Marie Rouault-Chedid says, “We partnered with a crystal store, Metaphysical on Main street and we’ve been buying crystals from them for wholesale price." They choose to donate 20% of their sales to the Moose Jaw Transition House.

Each company set up a table outside of the front office to be ready for lunchtime and once that bell rang, dozens of students were crowded around each table. 

President of Seed Of Later and grade 11 student Avery Seman says it was a huge process, “We worked all together producing our product, coming up with the steps for that, getting our social media launched as well as things like pricing finances. We’re all shareholders within our company so we each pitched in a certain amount so we’ll get payback at the end for how much we participated with. We’ve done so much it’s been crazy. Learning how to make websites, using Shopify, writing receipts, everything in the last couple of days.”

Sales were very successful for each table, dozens of students placed orders for each company. Now the class will dive into how to deal with the literal money and breaking it down and how they're going to distribute their orders.