Hudson High School

Welcome to Business Literacy and Principles of Investing! We have hit the ground running and have already learned so much in these two, one-semester elective classes.  

Both classes are graded 80% formative and 20% summative; in-class participation, group work, peer reviews, respectful feedback, great attitudes, self-starters, and a thirst for business and investing knowledge are required in these electives. Each student contributes, each student brings curiosity and a unique understanding to these classes and that's why they're meaningful. My ambition as your student's teacher is to make these classes the very best classes your student will ever take. 

Welcome to Business Literacy, a one-semester class learning basic business functions through hands-on in-class projects as well as real-life sales experiences.  Each day, students work through researching, writing, reading, and creating basic business functions. Classes are held in a Computer Lab; please no food or drink.

Classes move quickly and students are given an M for Missing work and are required to complete work on Google Classroom. 

Students are responsible for checking Google Classroom daily.  Worksheets given to students at the beginning of each class focus on learning about the business world, and we deep dive into learning about business products like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint.

We also research and study successful/unsuccessful businesspeople and ideas. Students may work in groups, but much of the class work is independent and individual.  Students are graded for class participation, in-class work, class presentations, class work assigned via Google Classroom, and project work.

Please contact me any time at suttons@hudson.k12.oh.us  I'm here to help your student in any way I can!

Business Literacy Syllabus Fall 2023

August and September:

• How to Build a Small Business in One Semester?
• How to Create a Product that Sells
• How to Work with a Design Program like Microsoft Paint or Canva
• How to Print a Design with a Transparent Background
• How to Weed a Design
• How to Heat Press a Design onto a Shirt
• How to Create a Business Plan: Mission Statement, Finances, Target Audience, Creative Content
• Marketing and the 4p’s of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion
• Small Business Finances: Short- and Long-Term Financial Goals, Costs, Revenue, Total Profit or Loss
• Public Speaking and Studying Professional Public Speakers
• Speaking Techniques: What do we like and what can we work on?
• Resume Building: How to build a resume with little to no work experience
• How to Write a Cover Letter
• How to Write an Email and Attach a Document
• Create a Marketing Plan in Microsoft PowerPoint
• Business Banking: What’s a Check? What’s the difference between a Debit card and a Credit card? What is Venmo? What is consumer negligence?
• Business Fraud- What do I Need to Look Out for and Why?
• Studying Different Types of Companies- LLC and Sole Proprietor
• Why some Companies Declare Bankruptcy i.e. Longaberger Baskets and what that means?

October:

• Research and Design an Online Presence for Products
• What is ETSY?
• What is Business Valuation?
• What is a business structure: CEO, CIO, CFO and why are they important?
• Personal Business vs. Small Business and why it’s important to keep them separate.
• Can We Accept Credit Cards for Payment in Our Semester Sales (see below for information about our semester sales in October and December)?
• Can We Accept Venmo for Payment in Our Semester Sales? Why or Why not?
• Can We Accept Cash? What are the risks with taking cash in hand?
• What is a small entry price point?
• What is a ceiling on a price point?
• Why is it hard to make money selling small handmade goods?
• What is Point of Sale and a Sales Cycle?
• What is a Soft Sell and what can I learn from it?
• How to create a general journal entry
• What can we learn from business case: Famous Amos
• What do private equity firms do well and how did they immediately turn around Famous Amos cookies?

November:

• What is an email campaign
• Creating a Google Site to sell a product
• Google and Facebook transformed marketing - how
• Google and Facebook transformed the way we search- why
• What is powerful about a simplistic website design
• Building our handmade products for our December sales
• December 2, 8, 9, 10 -sales in Hudson
• December sales - practicing our soft skills for pitching our products plus building our online Google Site

December:

• Reading and building our Google Site with Brand Media Marketing
• Marketing, Canva, and Email campaigns- what have we learned that works?
• What doesn't work when we sell online- think too complicated
• December 2, 8, 9, 10 -sales in Hudson
• December sales - practicing our soft skills for pitching our products plus building our online Google Site
• Wrap-up Google Site and turn in all work for assessment
• Final quizzes

Keys to Success in Fall 2023 Business Literature:

Students encounter an interactive class including hands-on activities and group discussions, speaking with other students, learning online, writing assignments by hand, as well as learning and using Microsoft Docs, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Respectful, business-minded, and ready to learn are the attributes to have in each class.

Google Classroom contains most of the student assignments although we often use hand-written assignments waiting for students at their computers as they enter the room to engage their understanding, reinforce learning, build solid sentence structure, and increase understanding of our subject matter that day.

Students are expected to come to class with pencils, pens, and equipment charged.

Business Literacy Topic Breakdown and Coordination with Ohio Financial Literacy Standards 

**These topics are discussed throughout the semester.

What better way to learn about Business Literacy than to build a small business and sell products? This class creates products to sell at Hudson High School Senior Night on October 6, 2023, as the Hudson Explorers take on the Nordonia Knights. Next, we brainstorm and create different products to sell at the Hudson Community First Holiday Sale at East Woods Intermediate School on December 2, 2023, and the Chrstkindlmrkt on Saturday, December 9, 2023, in downtown Hudson.

The first product for sale is a Hudson or Fall themed sweatshirt made in our Media Center with the coordination of our Maker Space and Mr. Andrew Robitaille who has prepared several hands-on lessons for our Business Literacy students to understand, develop, design, and build the prototype design to be printed out and pressed onto the sweatshirts for sale.

To understand sales, the students tour the area to sell their products and tour the site of marketing their products in front of the school and possibly online.

We dive into how to create a t-shirt business basics including how to buy quality sweatshirts for a fraction of their original cost; how to design a Senior Night design or Fall design, how to create design on Canva or other editing product, how to scale design, how to create appropriate colors, how to make a transparent background, how to physically put designs on shirts, how to sell them and how to accept payment.

The Young Entrepreneurs Institute speaks to the students about small business product brainstorming and ideation. 

We compose an income statement and determine the net profit of the business.

We create several online Marketing Plans for our shirt business as well as other fictious businesses throughout the semester to examine different marketing strategies for selling different products and services. Using Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel emphasize our business ideas and highlight our research.  Using Microsoft is a change and sometimes a challenge for our students as they only use Google products in the classroom.  The emphasis is on learning for the business world, therefore Microsoft products are used every day in class.

Topic Two: Marketing

Scope of Marketing: The 4ps of Marketing, where are we selling, who is our target marketing audience and who is our tertiary marketing audience, the students build a Marketing Plan next to highlight their product, understand their small business mission, logo, basic financial balances, profit and loss, and study the art of public speaking, understand public speaking storytelling and encapsulate that skill into their selling strategy. Marketing includes how to get our product to market; confirm tables, tablecloths, product delivery, product packaging, online presence for questions, return policy (no returns), order more or we have too much? Students present a 10 page Microsoft PowerPoint report to the class with peer review and feedback for fictious businesses to promote again and again learning about the 4ps of marketing while building speaking and sales skills.  Students also design a marketing mix of a new or modified product and how to promotion these.  Finally, students design and build a Microsoft PowerPoint of the four phases of the product life cycle with peer review and discussions.

Specifically, we research and build an Excel document to explore different salaries meeting budget goals for a 50/30/20 annual budget. Plus we create several financial documents each week to dive into Excel, promote understanding of our financials in our Shirt Business and other fictious businesses students individually explore.  This includes researching and building short- and long-term financial goals both in real life and in our business dealings, both for now in high school and into the future for college and beyond college.

Students learn to Compare/Contrast the differences between big and small business.  Next, students create a time management weekly work schedule of their work plus fictious employee work.  Students try to distinguish the difference between effectiveness and efficiency philosophies in running a business.

Students study what works and what doesn’t work in financial analysis.  Learning from companies that spent too much and declared bankruptcy protection and computing the net worth/net loss of an individual, business, and corporation based on the accounting formulas is a requirement in basic business functions.  Students will often hear that if you don’t know where your money is, you’re not going to stay in business for long.  Finally, we construct a balance sheet for numerous fictitious businesses.  

Throughout the semester, we often talk about different career paths, what it takes to build a certain career for instance, we may study History in college and then want to go to law school. How much do each of the paths of study cost and where can we find financing? We explore LinkedIn for jobs now in high school as well as in college and beyond to develop a sense of real life salaries and costs of living for those jobs. We create a help wanted advertisement based on a job specification form, and students review what questions are appropriate and inappropriate to ask in a job interview.

TEACHER: Mrs. Stephanie Sutton, suttons@hudson.k12.oh.us, room B104 Computer Lab

COURSE DESCRIPTION:  Welcome to Principles of Investment, a one semester class learning basic business functions through hands-on in-class projects as well as real-life sales experiences.  Each day students work through researching, writing, reading, and creating investment fundamentals. Classes are held in a Computer Lab, please no food or drinks. Classes move quickly and students are given an M for Missing work and are required to complete work on Google Classroom.  Students are responsible for checking Google Classroom daily.  At times worksheets are given to students at the beginning of each class to focus on learning about the investment world, and we deep dive into learning business products like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint. We also research and study successful/unsuccessful businesspeople and ideas. Students may work in groups, but much of the class work is independent and individual.  Students are graded for class participation, in-class work, class presentations, class work assigned via Google Classroom, and project work.  This course is 80% formative and 20% summative, please see Hudson grading scale for how grades are determined.

August, September

What is Investing and Why Do We Invest?

What Does it Mean to Own a Share?

How Many People Invest in the Stock Market?

How to Play the Stock Market Game?

Do other Countries Invest in Stocks?

What’s the Most Popular Stock Market?

What is Short-Term Investing and Why We Don’t Do It!

We Invest in Companies, People and Products- NOT Share Prices

What is Investing for Long Term Financial Goals Like a Home and Retirement?

What are Two Vehicles for Building Sustained Wealth and Security?

What are Mutual Funds and What is Risk Allocation?

What are Investment Vocabulary Terms Used Almost Every Day in Class?

What are Large Capitalization Markets, Mid-Cap Markets, and Small Cap Markets? Why do We Need Know?

How to Build Microsoft Excel to Dive into Financial Reports

How to Use Microsoft Word to Build Homework Assignments and How to Attach Documents to an Email.

What is Tesla? Case Study about Tesla and Why It’s Not a Car Company

Examining Elon Musk and Who and What he is

What Do We Look for in Tesla and Companies When We Invest in Them?

Tesla, a forward thinking technology company that builds emerging technologies and prides itself on its environment friendly policies.

Risk vs. Reward in the Stock Market

Time and Compound Interest

Basic Math for Investing

Choosing Assets.  What’s an Asset vs. a Liability?

Can We Enter the Stock Market as Teenagers?

How Do We Purchase a Mutual Fund?

What Companies Sell Mutual Funds? How do they sell them? For instance, a portfolio of Large Cap companies vs. a portfolio of Small Cap companies

Discuss Chris Muller’s article Small Cap vs. Large Cap Company Investment.

Why are Small Cap Companies Sometimes a Better Investment than Large Cap?

Reading Financials: How to Find Gross Profits, Operating Income, Earnings Per Share Why They Matter and They Promote Better Valuation?

What is Return on Investment and Why Does Help Us Value Companies?

Building a 50%/30%/20% Budget for Now and Into the Future

Credit Cards- What are they? What happens when I put a charge on my credit card? What happens when I carry a balance on a credit card? Do credit cards seem complicated on purpose? What are points and earning perks on credit cards? Why do I have 30 days to pay back a credit card? What happens when I only pay back minimums?

Building Business Cases and How to Build Summaries of Companies

• Short Description
• Stock Symbol
• Corporate History
• Corporate Culture
• Recent History
• Company Culture
• Fun Facts
• Costs and Overall Financial Outlook Now and In the Future
• Company Website

Building our first Case Studies of Different Businesses

October

College Choices and Career Choices

Is College Right for Me?

How to Pay for College?

Why is College an Investment?

How to Build the Ultimate College Excel Worksheet

Scholarships

Tuition Assistance, FASFA

College Loans- Subsidized vs. Unsubsidized Loans

Real Estate and Investing for Your Home. Is it just a dream to own a home?

Home Valuation

What is a REIT?

November

What is an EFT? What are the best online brokers to purchase mutual funds?

How to purchase no fee mutual funds?

How to Build Case Studies with Google Sites including Google Analytics?

How to Build and Understand a Consolidated Statement of Operations for your Business Case Study

December

Review Vocabulary

Present Business Case Studies with Peer Reviews

Present Strategies for Building Sustaining Wealth Vehicles with Peer Reviews

Present Strategies for Building Excel Worksheets for Budgeting

Present Strategies for Building Word Documents for Business

How to Send a Document as an Attachment

Khan Academy and other Resources for Tutoring or Extra Help

Building a Resume for High School and College

Semester Exam

Students encounter an interactive class including hands-on activities and group discussions, speaking with other students, learning online, writing assignments by hand, as well as learning and using Google Classroom, Google Sites, Microsoft Docs, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Respectful, business-minded, and ready to learn are the attributes to have in each class.

Google Classroom contains most of the student assignments although we often use hand-written assignments waiting for students at their computers as they enter the room to engage their understanding, reenforce learning, build solid sentence structure, and increase understanding of our subject matter that day.

Students are expected to come to class with pencils, pens, and equipment charged.