This document describes an activity where students work in groups to create their own bakery businesses. Each group plans elements of their bakery like the name, location, products. The teacher then provides changing business conditions for each bakery, like increases or decreases in customers, ingredient prices, or luck events. Groups discuss the impacts and give presentations on their bakery's performance each month. The activity aims to improve students' speaking, teamwork, and business management skills through an engaging simulated business simulation and presentation experience.

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Activity Type: Group work; problem-solving; project management
Level: Adaptable: from Pre-Intermediate (B1) – Advanced (C2)
Skills: Speaking & Listening; Discussion; Presentation
Class Size: Whole group lesson, e.g. twelve students in a class will make x4 groups of 3
SS or x3 groups of 4 SS
Time: 90 minutes
Aim: To encourage students to work together with a common goal; to improve
speaking and interpersonal skills; to practise giving short presentations to the
rest of the class
Materials: Whiteboard and pens; students have their notebooks and pens
Procedure:
Part 1: Planning Your Bakery
1. T presents the task to the groups: work together to create your own bakery. T writes the
parameters (in bold below) on the board and SS think of answers. (See examples, below.)
Create Your Own Bakery!
Name: e.g. ‘Joanna’s Bakery’
Location: where it is based in the town (or in the world)
Opening Hours: e.g. from 7am to 8pm
Manager: one student plays the manager
Staff: how many; demographics; qualities; loyalty, etc.
History: when opened; ups and downs; high points / low points, etc.
Slogan: e.g. ‘Where your bread is our business!’ etc.
Logo: SS draw a logo for their bakery
Top 5 products: e.g. 1. sliced white bread, 2. jam donut, etc.
2. Each group presents their ideas to the whole class. T should make notes to be able to ask
about the details later.
Part 2: Running Your Bakery
1. T introduces the concept of the variables – different conditions that affect each bakery. T
writes the five variables on the board:
Customers
Price of ingredients
Staff
New Products
Luck (Positive or Negative) (one word or phrase – see possible ideas below)
T gives different conditions for each group for the following month. For example, for Group A
the conditions could be:

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Customers  10% the number of customers decreased by 10%
Price of ingredients  5% the price of ingredients increased by 5%
Staff one quit you have lost one team member
New Products x4 you develop four new products
Luck publicity your bakery is featured in the local newspaper
T knows the future and tells each group what will happen to them in the following month. T
writes the conditions on the board (as the bold text, above). Each group dicusses the
conditions – what they mean and why they happened – and prepares a ‘monthly report’ which
will be presented to the whole class after about ten minutes. For example, T might say to one
group:
‘OK, in the next month you increased your customers by 20%. Why? What
happened? What did you do differently? But the price of ingredients increased by 6%.
What did you do? Maybe increased the price of some of your products – or looked for
a cheaper supplier? You got two new staff. Why? What are their roles? What are their
names? You developed only one new product. Why? What was it? How did it do?
Luck – sports car. OK, now please discuss it and prepare your monthly report...’
This is the fun part because the teacher ‘plays god’ and can make each group’s bakery either
a roaring success or a complete failure – or something in between! T gets a chance to use
their imagination while deciding the varying fortunes of each bakery.
2. After about ten minutes one person from each group gives their monthly report to the class. A
different student should speak each time. After giving the report, they should state their total
net profit for that month. Then T and/or other SS can comment on how they did. T moderates
discussion, then we hear the rest of the reports. In a class of twelve SS, there should be
either three or four groups – or SS can work in pairs, but the reporting process will take much
longer.
3. T gives conditions for the following month to each group, then they discuss them in their
groups and prepare their monthly report, as detailed above.
4. This process of 10 mins group discussion followed by short presentations can continue for as
long as required. In a 90-minute class you could probably get through the setup and three
discussions/presentations, depending on how you pace it. Once SS have got the idea of the
activity, T can give increasingly outlandish conditions. For example, they could simply write
the word ‘elephant’ for ‘Luck’ and SS have to decide what this means. It could be either
positive or negative – or both! For example, an elephant escapes from the zoo and crashes
into the side of the bakery – which is rather negative – but the increased publicity (along with
the insurance payment) more than compensates, and leads to a really healthy net profit – so
it is actually positive. (See below for more ‘Luck’ ideas.)
5. The activity ends after several rounds – ideally when every student has presented. There is
no winner, since the groups are not competing against each other.
6. SS could write up the process – what they did – or write a newspaper article about their
bakery, or a menu or promotional material, or another kind of text. You could even organise a
‘Dragon’s Den’-style activity in the next lesson, where each bakery bids for money for a new
initiative. Five students could form the panel.

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Ideas for Luck:
Positive:
• social media the bakery is featured on a popular Facebook group
• investment the bakery receives substantial investment – SS must say why
• Christmas an upturn in business due to the holiday period leads to...
• bonus the owner gives staff a bonus, leading to increased productivity
• lottery a win allows the bakery to expand and serve more customers
• cold weather a change in the weather leads to greater sales of hot food...
etc.
Negative:
• accident a customer slips over in your bakery; you have to pay compensation
• good weather fewer people eat cakes and pies in warm weather; what do you do?
• accountant the bakery’s accountant is arrested for tax irregularities
• flooding the bakery is flooded; how serious is it? SS decide
• fight one of your staff members is involved in a fight. What happened?
• PR disaster the launch of one of your products is disastrous
etc.
Note: you could ask SS to come up with these ‘Luck’ ideas as a separate exercise before your begin,
or for homework.
With some practice, you could get really quick at giving the conditions, e.g. simply write the following
for a group to discuss:
 5%
 10%
-2
5
mayor
The SS will understand after a few rounds that the above notes mean: customers increased (why? SS
decide), prices increased (how did the bakery react?), two staff left (why? SS decide), five new
products were created (what? SS decide), and there was either good or bad luck (it’s up to the SS)
involving the word ‘mayor’. It is very low effort for T but allows a lot of discussion as SS try to work out
the puzzle together.
Twist: each group has a turn ‘playing god’ with the other groups, with various provisos – e.g. they
must give two positive conditions and two negative conditions. This could work if your SS take it
seriously, rather than simply bankrupting all of their competing bakeries!

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Benefits of the Activity:
• It’s a very simple activity with zero set up time, but allows plenty of speaking practice, as well
as a lot of enjoyment for SS and T alike
• High student-talking-time
• TTT is low, but T controls the timing of the elements, and the destinies of the bakeries
• Nice alternation of group discussion and short presentations
• High level of engagement from SS
• Interesting for the teacher – using imagination to determine the fortunes of the different
bakeries. The story of each bakery builds – with its ups and downs – with each round
• A fun topic
• It’s fully adaptable – you can alter the bakery details in the setup and the variables to suit your
preference or to make it easier/harder for different levels
• The activity expands or contracts to fit the time – do more or fewer rounds
• It can be adapted to fit other businesses, e.g. a restaurant, a toy shop, a petrol station, a
convenience store, a bookstore, etc.
• A lot of laughter!
• Works like clockwork: ‘set them up and watch them go!’
Potential Challenges:
• SS may not be used to or comfortable with group work
• SS may not be used to or comfortable with giving short presentations
• T may not be comfortable with improvisation
• T and SS may not be comfortable with ditching the course book – ‘going off-book’
• The topic of bakery may not be interesting for your group – then find out what kind of
business they are interested in running
• SS not working in groups (coasting) or not taking the activity seriously
Genuine Student Comments about the Activity:
• ‘You’re teaching us business management!’
• ‘It was a funny lesson.’
• ‘A good process – good for learning – discussion and presentation.’
• ‘Good for improving our skills – writing, speaking, and imagination.’
• ‘Discussion and speaking is good.’
• ‘Today is better than yesterday [a lesson with a course book], because the lesson is funny
and I learned new words.’

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Board Plans:
Here are some board plans from when I first trialled this activity:
Set up and first conditions for one of the groups; they had a hard time that month!
So much discussion was generated from just a few simple marks on the board!

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There was good news and bad news for this bakery – just like in real life!