The fifth grade class at Callaway Public School has a dream. The kids want to take a trip to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha and spend the night in the aquarium sleeping with the sharks - literally. When they discovered that such a trip wasn’t in the school budget, the students took matters into their own hands. Again, literally.

The kids have spent the past several weeks planning, creating and pitching products that they might be able to sell. Patterned after the popular TV show Shark Tank, they pitched their ideas to a panel of judges, and even to the school board, with three winning products being selected.

There are 14 members of the fifth grade class, and all are involved in the project. “It’s a social studies project that we started because we were getting kind of bored with our book, so we thought maybe we should try something else. So we looked online and found this Shark Tank project,” explained fifth grade teacher Kim Sallach. “Mrs. Weverka co-teaches with me and we divided the kids up and each team had to invent something and take it to the sharks, like on the show. Mr. Birkel, Mr. Keeney, Mr. Hanson and Mrs. Jesseph were our sharks and the kids had to present to them.”

Sallach said that Hanson then proposed a real-life Shark Tank, and told the kids that if they could go back and come up with a product that they could do “in real life”, that he would fund it. The students could then turn around and sell the products to make money for the school.

“So we decided, why not use this as our funding for the zoo? So that’s how it started,” Sallach said.

The three products the students have settled on making and selling are stress balls, slime and bath bombs. “There is a group that makes each of the products - a group for slime, a group for stress balls, and a group for bath bombs,” explained student Georgia Guthrie.

“For the stress balls, we have one that is made with balloons and rice, and one that is made with balloons and flour,” Lauren Reiff added.

“The bath bombs are made with epsom salt, baking soda, corn starch and coconut oil. We also have different scents; we put food coloring and the essential oils in the coconut oil,” said Amelia Pandorf. “We just thought of a color for each one, and then just got our names from there.”

The bath bomb scents include Day at the Spa, Good Night Sleep, Out in the Field, Squeaky Clean, Bouquet of Flowers and Day in the Deer Stand.

The students had a booth at the Old Fashioned Christmas Around Town craft fair last Tuesday, and they are also selling their products at some home basketball games. The next opportunity to purchase the products and help the students achieve their goal is during the Jan. 17 basketball game when South Loup hosts Arcadia-Loup City.

Though it may not be the biggest seller of their products, the students all agreed that the slime is the most fun of the three to make. “The kids have already sold so much that we have had to remake some of the things,” said Weverka.

Georgia proudly shared that between selling their Shark Tank products and working the concession stand, the class has already earned $1,500 of their $2,000 goal. When asked what would be done with any leftover funds, Lauren replied, “We’re going to give it to the school so the school can get something for everyone.”

“Our regular social studies textbook was bombarding us with vocabulary and lots of stuff, so we thought that maybe we could do that in a different way,” explained Sallach. “Our vocabulary words were entrepreneur, economy, and things like that and we were studying about consumables, different resources, supply and demand and we thought those things would just fit into a project like this.”

Sallach is in her 27th year of teaching fifth grade at Callaway Public School, and Weverka is in her 22nd year.