Story Sweet Shop

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. So, you know, I've been doing this PTA thing for a few years now, and I I almost want to test whether I have learnt anything useful which I can apply to my planning and which means that the event is then a success. So to understand this properly, I need to tell you that my usual approach to anything relating to the PTA is bucket loads of enthusiasm and optimism and 100% hope and almost 100% certainty that all the families in the school will come along to the PTA organised event or activity, whatever it is. And so therefore I plan and prepare according to that assumption. Now, sometimes in the past uh this has meant that we've perhaps inadvertently over-catered, uh, and I'm hoping that perhaps some of those previous experiences have rubbed off on me, and that this episode is going to document whether that is indeed the case, whether I have learnt from past experiences. Anyway, let's delve in deeper now and I will explain exactly what this event is. The idea for the story sweet shop um came to me about two years ago, and I actually started thinking of it as a magical sweet shop just for Harry Potter sweets. Um, because in the Harry Potter stories they're uh they have a special sweet shop called Honey Jukes, which sells a huge variety of sweets, and I know that you can buy official Harry Potter sweets, but also other sweets that you can label as Harry Potter sweets, and I just thought it might be a really fun thing for the kids to um take part in. And then with World Book Day approaching, I I thought it could become a story sweet shop with all the sweets being sold there as being sweets out of stories. So again, you could have the Harry Potter honeyduke sweets, I could have incorporated sweets from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example. But I quickly realised that not all children's stories have sweets associated in with them in the story. So we adapted it slightly by making some sweets link into the stories instead. And then once the idea was kind of morphed into a workable idea, I just checked with the head of school whether the school would be happy with us doing a sweet sale. So my PTA has never done a sweet sale before where we've just sold sweets to the children, and I wasn't sure if it would be okay with the healthy eating policy that the school has. We do do key cake sales at school, and obviously a sweet sale would kind of fall in the same category as that. Um she confirmed that it was fine. The school has you know sees sweets and cakes as a treat, so it's you know more of a one-off event, which is exactly what it is. So that was all good, and yeah, the school were on board. Then came a really exciting part for me because it was time to decide which sweets we were going to have in the sweet shop. So we made a list of uh popular children's stories, and basically then we tried to find sweets to link to them. And when picking the sweets, we tried to go for a variety of sweets, so they're not all you know haribout style. Um, the Haribo style sweets you tend to get huge choice, and they're all different colours and different flavours and different shapes, because I guess it's easy to uh mould a sort of gummy sweet into a particular shape, but I didn't want to have them all of that kind of sweet because I know not all children like those sorts of sweets, so we did try and look for um some different things so there was something for everybody, and uh I realised that we also needed to account for different dietary requirements. In fact, a parent contacted me as I was sort of halfway through looking at the sweets, and um she was incredibly helpful in trying to make sure there was some sweets um specifically for vegans and vegetarians. So as I said, I'd already thought about that, I'd already ordered some that covered those bases, but she was helpful in in checking some of the ingredients and I guess just making me aware as PTA chair that we needed to make sure everybody um could come along and enjoy something. So so I've actually found it very helpful that she um that she got in touch with me about that. So we decided on eight sweets in the end, and this is what we have gone for. Let me just grab them. Okay, so I have here my little bags with me. So for Winnie the Pooh books, we chose we found a chocolate-covered honeycomb, like little bits of honeycomb, like honeycomb bites covered in chocolate. The gruffalo, the gruffalo is a great book to pick actually, because there are so many different animals in there that you could buy sweets for. But we decided to go for jelly snakes, and we're labelling them as um scrambled snakes because that's what it says in the book. Uh, obviously, we could have chosen owl ice cream, but I didn't think that was gonna work so well at the sweet sale. Oh, ooh, just thinking about that, we could maybe do that in the summer, maybe for like a frozen Friday or something. I need to remember that. Uh, then we've got Oi Frog, and I found some gummy frogs that are I think they're apple flavour. Um so we did go for a Harry Potter suite, and whenever I read Harry Potter and they mention fizzing whisbies, I always imagine that those are the flying saucer suites that you can buy. So I ordered some of those and I've relabeled them as fizzing whisbies. Um what else? Oh, we're going on a bear hunt. That was quite easy. We just got some haribour uh they're called Haribo Gold Bears, but they're the tiny little chewy bears, and they're all different fruity flavours, so they're very yummy. There's a book called The Day the Crayons Quit, and I managed to find some um sweets that look like crayons. I'm not entirely sure what they're called, but they're sort of very long, um, but then cut up into uh they're about I don't know four centimetres long or something. They're all different colours and they look like little crayons. I think they're called pencil sweets or something like that. Um then for the very hungry caterpillar, again that was really straightforward because in that book there are loads of different food items, but I went for the giant strawberries, chewy giant strawberries, and finally we have at our school we have a close connection with the author who's written a series of books called Scarlet and Ivy, and so I asked her if um she could recommend anything that would fit with her books, and her books are set in a girls' boarding school in about the 1930s, and she recommended some Fizzy Cola bottles, which apparently Fizzy Cola bottle suites were around in the 1930s, which I didn't know. So I have ordered Fizzy Cola bottles. Uh I'm actually really pleased that she suggested Fizzy Cola bottles because I don't have don't think I've ever met a child who doesn't like Fizzy Cola bottles, so I'm expecting these to be quite a good seller. So we have in total we have eight different choices, and within that eight, we've got five which are suitable for vegetarians, and three suitable for vegans. There are also no nuts in any of the sweets, and some of them are dairy-free and gluten-free. So I think we've covered all bases, and I hope we've got something for everyone. And I know the fizzing with bees or these flying saucer sweets, which are basically, I hope you know what I mean when I describe them, they're sort of rice paper, um, flying saucer shaped, like UFO shaped, and in the middle there's loads of sherbet when you bite into it. So these ones are fantastic because they are everything free, they are dairy-free, gluten-free, vegan vegetarian, um, and no nuts. So if you're looking for something that covers everybody, definitely go for some of those. Um, and the other thing I thought of when um when the parent contacted me um um to ask about the sale being a dietary inclusive sale, it gave me the idea of sending a list out of the sweets and their ingredients out to all parents in advance of the sale, which I have just done today actually. So I typed up all the ingredients on one page, made it into a PDF and asked the school to send it out to all parents. Um I thought that that as I thought as a parent, if I have a child who can't have particular things, I think I would find that really useful and I would then be able to go into the sale with my child, knowing which ones they could and couldn't have, and also letting my child know that there are some sweets they can't have, but there are there are some sweets that they can have, and I thought as a parent I wouldn't want to um have a tricky situation with my child at the sale, so hopefully sharing the ingredients in advance um makes it just a bit easier and more inclusive for everybody. And hopefully that will mean everybody will come to the sale next Tuesday. Hooray! Originally, when I was thinking about this sweet shop, I wanted to run it as a pick and mix style sweet shop because I I love giving children the ability to make their own choices. But thinking it through in a practical sense, I just knew that unfortunately it might just be complete chaos if we did a pick and mix style. Uh I think even providing scoops and tongs um for, you know, the bowls of sweets. I just know that little hands would just creep in and um, you know, help themselves and also we'd have the problem of well, I don't know if it's a real problem, but there's a possibility of cross-contamination um between the sweets and um and then then I wasn't really sure how to charge for the sweets at the end. So if you gave a child a paper bag and they filled up with the sweets of their choice, would we have to weigh it at the end? And if we did do it that way, how would we charge for that? Because all the sweets are completely different prices. Um and then I thought that gosh, if we have to weigh every single bag at the end, that's gonna create a massive long queue. I just couldn't see a way that we could actually run it as a traditional pick and mix, which I was a little bit disappointed about. But then somebody in my team suggested that we bag the sweets up and we sell bags ready-made. Uh, I was very keen to keep the sweets separate so that the children could still have a choice of what they wanted to buy, so we thought that would be okay to sort of um package them up separately, um, and but also do some mixed bags for anybody that wanted a variety. So once we decided on that, we then we then had to sort out loads of bags and labels, and it just made me think of another superpower that you have if you're part of a PTA. I think I mentioned in a previous podcast about the superpower of adaptability that you have to be able to adapt to new situations. It feels like sometimes constantly, doesn't it, when you're organising an event. Well, another superpower, I think, is that of problem solving. And I just feel sometimes in some events you're just constantly on this really long road of problem solving one thing after another, and this event was no exception. So when we decided that we were going to bag up the sweets in individual bags, of course, then we had to decide, well, what kind of bags are we going to do, and how big are the bags going to be, and how are we going to label the bags? So we decided in a meeting earlier this year that we're going to try and be a more sustainable PTA. Uh so using plastic bags for all the sweets was completely out of the question. That was an easy decision to make. We're going to use paper bags. Uh, in fact, these lovely paper bags, can you hear these paper bags here? This is the sound of green and white stripey paper bags. And these ones are labelled with the Very Hungry Caterpillars Chewy Strawberries. This is the sound of brown and white paper bags, and these ones are labelled with the gruffaloes, scrambled snakes. So I love these style of paper bags, they look like old-fashioned sweet bags, and you can get them in all sorts of different colours. They are white, stripey with the colour. White and stripey with the colour. Gosh, does that make sense? Um, and I order them off eBay, and you can get £100 paper bags for um £3. So they work out £3p a bag, which I think is okay. And they are about the size of a photo, they're like seven inches by five inches or something. So they're just the right size, not too big, not too small, just perfect, really. And because you can get them in all different colours, I ordered eight different colours and they're going to look beautiful on the table, I just know it. But of course, the disadvantage with a paper bag is that you cannot see what's inside the bag. We happen to have some clear cellophane bags left over from a different event we did last year. So, what we decided actually it's very simple, we're going to use these plastic bags to display the sweets in next to the big bowls of paper bags so that you can see what you're getting in your paper bags, but we're only using eight plastic bags instead of I don't know, 200 plastic bags. So, um so that's the decision we made. That is the problem that we solved. Of course, another problem with the paper bags is uh well with any bag is that we needed to label them. Um I think traditionally I would have thought a round label would look really nice, but of course, then I realised oh gosh we'd have to cut out 200 circles, which is going to be very time consuming, so I just went for a rectangular or square shape that I could easily cut out on the guillotine that I have at home, and then we just stuck them on with Pritstick, so it was really easy. So, what I'm envisaging for next Tuesday is we're going to set out a row of tables in the school hall, put some nice tablecloths on them. We're going to have the eight different books on display stud up on the table. Next to the book, we're going to have the plastic bag, which contains the sweets associated with that book. And in front of the book and the plastic bag, we'll have a container, a bowl, or a basket or something, with all the paper bags ready filled with the sweets. And that is what I imagine it's going to look like. I'm hoping we can achieve that. Every paper bag will just cost 50p, which will have the individual sweets in, and then we're going to do a mixed bag for a pound, which will which will obviously have more sweets in. We decided to go for 50p for the bags of sweets because first of all we wanted to make it affordable to everybody, and second of all, we want to encourage the children to buy more than one bag of sweets. So we still want to give the children a choice, and we felt that by having fewer sweets in a bag it might enable them to be able to pick two or three choices. And the last reason was that we didn't want to have too many sweets in the bag, um, because you know we want the children to enjoy eating their sweets and not be overfaced by just way too many sweets. So we're kind of trying to keep it at a suitable level, and then people can choose how many bags they want to buy instead of just having to accept a load of sweets in the bag. Um, so then having decided on how much we wanted to charge for the bags of sweets, that then led us into the next uh section of this planning, which is to source the sweets and decide um how many sweets to put in the bags. I mentioned that there was a lot of problem solving to do in all the planning of this event, and I think the hardest thing that I had to work out was how many sweets to buy. I didn't have time to go traipseing around a lot of shops or anything to look for sweets, so I found some really good wholesale sweet websites online and I decided to order my sweets from there and get them delivered. But it was really hard to tell what I should order. Uh obviously the sweets were in massive bags and massive tubs. And if you buy three kilograms of cola bottles, how many cola bottles is that? How many does that work out at per child? How many cola bottles would they want to eat? How many should I put in the bags? Ugh, it was blowing my mind trying to calculate this thing. But finally I managed to find a really useful website which gave the weights but also the quantities of sweets within the bags, so I was able to work out some really useful things. Um, the website was called Wholesale Sweets. So if you are doing a similar event like me and you you need to know the number of sweets in those massive bags, that is the website you need to go to. So I worked out some useful things. Um, three kilograms of fizzy cola bottles works out to be 910 sweets. So I did a few different calculations using an Excel spreadsheet. I worked out that 100 grams of cola bottles is about 60p. And then I tried to calculate how many sweets I could put in a bag for 25p because we wanted to sell the bags for 50p. So I thought if we have 25p's worth of sweets in the bag, the bag itself costs 3p. Then if we sell for 50p, we make just over 20p profit, which obviously isn't loads. Um, we don't always run events that make good amounts of fundraising. This event is more about giving the children a fun experience on World Book Day, but hopefully also covering our costs. If we make a profit, then that is fantastic, um, but it's not really a profit-driven event. Um, so just so you know, out of interest, you need 13 Fizzy Cola bottles in a paper bag uh to sell for 50p to make about 20p profit. So what I did was I measured out all the sweets that I got into some clear cellophone bags, and I took them to the rest of my PTA and we had a really good look at them to make sure it looked like the right amount. Because we were selling these bags for 50p, I was really concerned that we didn't put too many sweets in, which meant we wouldn't make much profit, but also that be we didn't put too few sweets in. I didn't want parents to come to the sale and think, oh gosh, that's not very many sweets for 50p. I don't think I'll buy any. I I wanted to make sure it was the right amount, um, and we did have to make some adjustments to just to get them all looking roughly the same, um, and you know, checking the prices to make sure that we weren't underselling ourselves as well, because you know, as you can tell from all my descriptions, this sweet sale has actually been quite complicated, lots of decisions to be made, lots of investigating to do, lots of research to do. So the amount of time that we've invested in it, I just wanted to make sure that we weren't just giving the sweets away, and I can be quite confident now that I'm well, I don't think we are. And the point we're at now is that all the sweets have arrived, all the paper bags are here, all the labels are here, so this week. All the members of my PTA have taken um home a big bag of sweets and the little paper bags, and we're all going to be bagging up sweets this weekend. Uh, and that's the stage we have got to. Oh, and I just had something else that I wanted to mention. Uh, because this event is happening on World Book Day, the teacher at our school who's in charge of all the World Book Day events, um, suggested that the school librarians might like to help with the sweet shop sale. So I was invited into school on um on Wednesday lunchtime, and I took in the colourful paper bags with all the labels printed out, and I sat with the group of uh librarians, um, there's only about six of them, and we sat in the library at lunchtime and we cut out labels and glued them onto paper bags and just had a really nice time actually talking about the sweets. I took in the uh cellophane bags of sweets so that I could show them what what the sweets looked like so I could enthuse them, I guess. Uh, and then when when we had finished doing sticking some of the labels on, uh I encouraged them to make some posters and we put those up around the school as well. So I think with any PTA event it's really really important to get the children involved, and if you have time to go into the school and to talk directly to the children and get them involved, it's a fantastic way of marketing your event because they then will go and talk to their friends. And I said, you know, go and talk to your friends, tell them what we're doing, and see which sweets they're going to buy. And the children had a lovely time discussing which of their friends really likes cola bottles or which of their friends is going to buy, like five bags of sweets, and it it was just really nice, and you could see that they were really excited about it as well. So that was great for me as as a volunteer to see how excited the children were for an event that that we were organizing. It was just just so lovely, and just you know, one of those little heartwarming moments that remind you why you spend so much time organising activities for the children that that they just really enjoy, and um you know sometimes it's just not about the money, it's just about giving them a lovely experience at school. And that's it for part one of this episode. I'm going to sign off now, and then next time you hear from me will be after the sale on Tuesday, so I can let you know how it went and whether all the planning and prep that I did was appropriate for the sale. So wish me luck and I'll speak to you again in a moment. Welcome to part two of the story sweet shop. It was World Book Day last week and we held the story sweet shop in the hall straight after school from 3 o'clock till about 3.30. Everyone had kind of finished buying then. I realised that in my uh part one I forgot to mention a very important point that I had to estimate how many sweets we're going to sell. So, as I mentioned before, I always slip into the trap of just assuming that everybody is excited about an event as I am, and the sweet shop was no exception to this. And I needed to put a figure on how many bags of sweets we needed to sell. We have about 80 children in the school, and I estimated or hoped that uh they would buy three to four bags each, which meant that we would have to make a total of 300 bags so they could each um you know have choices. And this was my best guess. I was really nervous about uh running out, and also I really wanted to provide the children with as wide a choice as possible. So that meant making up about 40 bags of each sweet type. So if you remember, we had eight different uh types of sweets, so we made 40 bags of each. And once I made that decision and we were making the sweets up, I spent most of the remaining time until the event worrying about the amount of sweets we bagged up and whether it was at all near the figure that we would actually sell because 300 seemed like an awful lot, and I was worried that I had really overestimated. Um then something else that happened um was the day before the sweet sale, but uh I suddenly had a moment of inspiration. I really wanted to create a magical experience for the children coming to the sweet shop, and I suddenly had the idea of creating like a mini um snapshot, I suppose, of each book with the display. So rather than just having the book next to a bowl of paper bags of sweets or a basket of sweets, I gathered together loads of toys and props from my PTA team to try and create a display for each book that represented each book, and I thought that would make the whole thing more enticing to the children and just a bit more magical rather than having piles of paper bags in the hall on a table. Um this of course did make it a lot more work, and it took me actually an entire day to figure out eight different displays. Um but I have to say, and I don't say this very often, I I completely nailed it. You know how for an event you can often have a vision in your head of what something will look like. Well, it feels like for the first time in my life I actually achieved it and I was really thrilled. Um I've put some photos on my website so you can see what I mean about the displays, but I was absolutely blown away with with what we'd managed to achieve. I I thought it looked really professional and um I I hope that the display made the whole sweet shop more enticing and magical for the kids. So the sale was a huge success in that I think most of the school came. The children did buy more than one bag on average each, but I did see some buying one of each. So some children did take home like six to eight bags of sweets, which was amazing. And for that sale on World Book Day, we sold 200 bags of sweets in about 20 minutes, so it was quite a shock. Um later on in that week we had a an author come to do a book signing, and so I decided that I would put the sweets out again. So this was only two days later. Uh, but I thought it was worth it. I thought, well, if I sell no sweets, at least I was there just in case somebody wanted more. But um more children came with more money, and we sold another 52 bags. So brilliant. So I estimated 300 bags and we sold 250 over two sales, which I thought was really, really good. Uh we do have some sweets left over, including some we didn't bag up, but they can all be saved to sell at a future event. I have checked all the best before dates, um, so yeah, that's that's gonna be fine. And we did make a small profit at the sale, not a huge one, because sweets are expensive to buy. But any any sweets we sell going forwards will be 100% for profit. So that was great. Kind of really good to know we've got that in the pipeline for next time. And of course, we've also got loads of uh colourful paper bags left over for future events and they just uh come in handy for all sorts of things, so it's actually really helpful to have a stock of those in our um PTA cupboard. So, as I mentioned at the start of this episode, I wanted to evaluate whether I've learnt anything from being part of the PTA so far, uh, which I could apply to this event, and the answer I think is yes. So, one of the things that I did well to remember was to allow enough time for setting up the event. I knew that the displays were slightly complicated. Uh I knew exactly how the displays should be, but I had uh uh uh I think it was three um of my PTA team to come and help, and um so I obviously had to show them the pictures, but they were great at copying the displays. It did take us, so for a team of four people, it did take us about uh 30 to 40 minutes to set up. But because I had remembered to allow extra time for setting up, we were actually ready when the kids started to come in the hall. So that is something I have learned, and the only way to really learn that I think is from experience, um, and to also have an event where you haven't allowed enough time to set up and you get in a bit of a pickle and to remember, right, next time I must do that better. I think I'm slightly worried that I did overestimate how much we would sell, but after the second sale, we had completely sold out of uh fizzy cola bottles and jelly snakes. So, in a way, perhaps it was the right amount. I'm never really sure if selling out of something is a good thing because it means that you could have sold more. So I I don't know if if I should take the approach of uh making sure we've got enough so we don't sell out, or if selling out is okay. I don't really know. Maybe somebody in uh business might be able to tell me the answer to that. Um it was a really popular event, and I can say most of the school did support it, which is obviously what I hoped would happen. In fact, with the second sale, I was surprised how many more sweets sold. So clearly the children at my school absolutely love sweets. Um would I do anything differently next time? I think the only thing I might change maybe is to have six types of sweets rather than eight. But I did uh like the fact that the children had a lot to choose from and the display looked you know, it took up a lot of space in the hall, so it looks like a really fun event to come to. Um one change I did make uh was that we didn't make up any mixed bags of sweets in the end. But because we've made up 300 bags of individual sweets, I was worried then if we sold mixed bags as well, then people wouldn't buy the original 300 bags we'd made, and I think that was definitely the right decision. Having said that, when we rolled the sweets out at a future event, I might make those into mixed bags. Um because people might just prefer it, I don't know, because it won't be a story sweet shop, it won't be a special sweet shop at the next event, so perhaps it doesn't matter. So, all in all, this event was a huge success. We made a profit and we have the potential to make even more money by selling the leftover sweets at a future event. We managed to pull off our vision for the sweet sales and it looked really incredible in the school hall when we had laid it all out. Um, look at the photos on my website so you can see the displays. Um, the choices of sweets that we picked were hugely successful. We definitely included everybody's dietary requirements, but we also were able to offer a really wide choice of types of sweets for everybody, and most importantly, the kids absolutely loved it. I didn't realise they could eat so many sweets, um, but it was it was wonderful having an event uh where you could see the faces of the children wondering: should I go for the gold bears, should I go for the pencils, should I get the honeycomb? It was so lovely, and then seeing them clutching their little bags of sweets as they went home was just just great and made it all worth it. So that's it from episode 7 on the PTA Podcast. Don't forget to rate or review my podcast and follow me. I am told this can help other people find me. If you've ever tried a new event that you haven't done before, why not let me know by email using hello at PTApodcast.com. I would love to hear from you. Good luck with whatever your PTA is working on at the moment, and I look forward to chatting with you soon. Bye for now.