4-09-2021 8:58am

KID’S ADS! The First Annual Design-an-Ad Contest Featuring Dexter's Creekside Intermediate 6th Graders

Scroll through to see wonderful ads created by brilliant 6th graders from Creekside Intermediate School in Dexter.

By Chuck Colby, STN Editor

What started out as a Zoom classroom visit has turned into one our paper’s favorite events ever. In March, I was invited to be a guest speaker for the 6th Graders at Creekside Intermediate in Dexter. 6th Grade teacher, Narda Black, asked me if I would speak for a half hour or so, as the kids were going through a learning segment on journalism, “We’d like to give these kids a practical, real world view of the newspaper business.” I was pleased to attend and was even more pleased to learn that the students had found what I was talking about interesting and fun.

I asked a few questions of the young pupils, including “how many of you would like to work for the newspaper when you grow up?”. There was a flurry of enthusiasm and I off-handedly threw out the opportunity for some of the kids to participate in creating ads for some of our clients. The kids loved the idea, and the teachers involved in the process also thought that it was fun, as well as educational.

I set about asking a few businesses if they would like to participate, thinking that I could get 10-15 businesses to get on board for this project by sponsoring the space in the paper at a discounted rate in order to actually showcase the student ads in our printed version of the paper. The support of the Dexter business community was overwhelming! After only a day, I had 20 businesses who had signed up and I thought we were all set. The next morning, when I checked my inbox, 8 more businesses had said that they would like to do it. By the end of that day, we had close to 35 businesses committed to doing this project with us. By the end of that week, we had 45 ads to create, and we decided that to print one for each business, we would have to divide them up between 2 papers, so this is the first installment of these ads, the ones that businesses chose to print are in the paper that arrived in mailboxes on Thursday, April 8th.

Multiple options were created for all of the businesses, who got to choose which design they would like to have represent their company. Overwhelmingly, store owners and service providers said to me, “This is one of the hardest decisions I have made as a business person!” Some businesses have said that they would like to provide some small gifts of thanks for the kids who created ads for them. The gifts range from in-store gift certificates to ice cream vouchers that the kids can redeem on upcoming warm days of spring.

Many of our advertisers have said that they would like to have us run ALL of these ads in upcoming issues, so watch for those over the next several weeks. Please, support these businesses who made the choice to support these kids. Tell them that you saw this and that you appreciate their engagement with the schools.

This posting has the first half of our 6th grade ads, we will post the rest next week. We LOVE them. Creekside 6th Grade, GREAT JOB! I personally LOVE this one below!

There is a * by the title of the ads that were selected by the businesses, but these are all of the ads that were drawn for these 24 companies. Enjoy!