Now before I sign off, we have our weekly A+ Award to hand out!
You've probably heard of a spelling bee, right? But for this week's A+, we're featuring a student who won a selling bee. We're talking about Arabella Rodi from Harmon Middle School in Aurora.
You see, a selling bee is a contest held by the Young Entrepreneur Institute. It challenges kids to develop a great business idea, and then create a short video to pitch their product or service.
Arabella's idea was inspired by her love of reading, and by being frustrated by confusing vocabulary words. When she was in third grade, she says "I was constantly asking the teacher for help with words I didn't know but eventually stopped as I didn't want to keep bothering her."
So, Arabella imagined a product that could shed light on those confusing vocab words, both figuratively and literally! It's a reading light with a voice-activated dictionary, which she calls Easy Reads. Once she had the idea, she needed an elevator pitch.
Arabella's teacher, Karen Sunderhaft, tells us, "It's a valuable skill to get your point across so your audience not only understands your idea but can feel the same passion you do about it. That is exactly what Arabella did!”
But don't take her word for it, here's a clip of Arabella's actual pitch.
[Arabella] All been there, that one part in our book when we just don't know what a word means! Well now, there's a solution: Easy Reads. Hi, I'm Arabella, the creator of Easy Reads. Easy Reads is a voice-activated reading light that can tell you what a word means.
Great pitch, Arabella! Let us know if you ever decide to develop your idea into a product, I think I could use one of those! Maybe I could invest too. In the meantime, here's this week's NewsDepth A+.