It's a fun place to work. Great staff. They make it so enjoyable. Support I mean they support me as well, too, and I just enjoy working for the Waunakee School District and Kimberly Lane. Thank you.

members of the board, thank you so much for having us. I'm so glad that we get to do this maiden voyage of a work study session, and I believe that that's perfect because as was mentioned with Ms. Krzinski being our employee of the month, a third of our student body was new to us this year, and a third of our staff was new to us. So I think it's great that we also get a new type of presentation to spotlight us. So thank you for that opportunity.

And the investment club is the first time that we've done that. So as you can see, we've got some eager um students who'll be sharing that later on.

One of the good things we did in order to welcome in all of our new families and all of our new students is actually about a year ago, um last week, um we invited all of the new students to come to our building. And what you can see is we made a slide for each one of them. So when they did the scavenger hunt around our building, um they got the warm welcome with their name on it.

One of the things that has for an instructional choice that you can make that has the most impact is asking students to self-evaluate their work. And so, that's something that we leaned leaned into. It was a lot of figuring that out of having students self-evaluate themselves according to criteria to figure that out.

And then our student experience goal, one of the things that we were looking at is having students using calming strategies. Uh cuz we know that emotions are the gateway to learning, and if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling that you need to figure out how to get yourself into a zone where you can actually do the learning.

He looked up from the page and he said, "I'm doing it. I'm doing it, Mrs. Knutson. And I'm really doing it.

The game is each kid has a portfolio of roughly $100,000, and the idea is just to grow it as much as possible, um, and hopefully maybe get into the top five by the deadline in April, um, to make the award ceremony.

It was actually sparked from a community member and parent at our school who does this type of thing for a living. So, we did get started, I want to say 3 to 4 weeks after he brought up the idea.

A short-term goal would be a thing that I would sell really quickly because it's not really doing well. Okay. And then what would be a long-term goal that you might have? A long-term goal would be a stock that I would hold for a long time.

For short-term, um, cut your losses. And then for long-term, let the winners run.

Oh, good. I got second place in the whole club. Which is amazing. And the whole club meaning like how many people? I mean like for the whole state? Like 800. Yes. Out of 800 and some portfolios, number two.

And, um, the time in the market is greater than timing the market.

Um I invested in the company of Target because like sometimes my family shops there, so I know it.

We found Kelechi was up over 150% within a couple of weeks. And this was a company that we did not know about. She found out all on her own. So, that was super super cool.

Um it's mostly about like Costco, it's a bigger company, so it has less risk of like going down. Mhm. And like a bigger company or a smaller company like Micron um has a higher risk of like going down and me losing money. And it also has a good risk of going up in money for me to win.

Um go big or go home.

It's where you spread all your money over all the companies. Like you don't put all your money in just one company, you put it in like a lot so you can gain more instead of just having it in one.

And the first thing he did is he turned to me and said, "Dad, can I put this in the stock market?

I think what I've seen across the globe and across Minnesota, I think Wayzata should be offering this across all the elementary schools. It's they learn so much, they love it and I think that these are invaluable skills.

So for their kind of age group, um, grades 4 through 6, there was 167 portfolios across Minnesota. Um, we were able to place three in the top five, which is eligible for the award ceremony, as well as seven out of the top 10, which was awesome.

And if you look at all the portfolios grades 4 through 12 in Minnesota, there are 885. We had five of the top 20 positions competing against fourth through 12th graders.

So, I'm just I'm wondering from a practical standpoint, like what what does the game look like? What is it like? What is the format? And how do they buy stocks and stuff? And how do they know what companies, you know, are available? And how do they learn about companies?

We structured the lessons out of the eight sessions that we met with them with mini lessons to teach a topic. So, for example, session one is what do you do with your money? Do you save it or spend it? Have you thought about ways to grow your money? And then we start talking about products, brands, and companies.

We used Yahoo Finance as a resource. We added some resources to our school website and kids had access to that both during technology and during club time and at home. We had a lot of kids researching at home.

So is this only in Kimberly Lane not across all elementary schools? We have a co-curricular kind of budget and then all depends on like who are advisors that are interested and available like we have art club, we have ukulele and this just happens to be one of the clubs that we have. I don't know if I don't think there are other elementary that have this one.

Is there any program at middle school or high school level? I remember seeing in one of the schools like the scoreboard if you will. Yes. So financial literacy now is a state standard. So we'll be doing that in our freshman classes but also our middle schools through their wind times and then they've also had a new elective course that has some of that financial literacy baked into it.

I know I had SNDK, and it that's an AI company that really helped me a lot.