The third-graders had just begun to shop Thursday morning, and all around New Burlington Elementary School's auditorium, the thrill of capitalism gripped half-sized consumers and vendors like a sugar high.
From behind the second-graders' fold-out table, a row of small-fisted children called to their classmates to buy fancy pins crafted from painted puzzle pieces, colored sun catchers and magnetized note pads.
Lindsey Dougherty, a fair-haired 8-year-old with an idea of how to get money into the till, lifted a plastic box from a basket and held it up. She pitched.
''We're selling these little boxes. They're 25 cents, and you can just keep little things in them,'' she said. ''And we're selling sun catchers for 50 cents.''
The outgoing little girl may have been more appealing than her spiel, but she was catching on. ''We're learning how to count money, and we're learning how to run a business,'' she said.
Learning how to run a business meant developing the products that Lindsey was pushing, and it meant competing with the other five grades of classmates who sold their goods at the school's Entrepreneurship School Fair Thursday.
And that wasn't easy. Lindsey was up against chocolates, candy-bracelet combinations and necklaces with a message.
Second-grade teacher Jackie Moreland organized the fair, designed to teach kids not only how to develop products and run a business, but how to manage their money and make consumer choices. Each of the three classes at each grade level - one through six - participated. The auditorium became a makeshift mall where age was no barrier to commerce.
''I wanted the children to understand that when you have an idea, we ought to go for our dreams,'' Miss Moreland said. ''This will give them an initial feeling of what it's like'' to run a business.
Each class was given $25 seed money, then set about developing a marketable product, determining price and figuring ways to promote it.
For instance, sixth-graders decided to include a candy ''warhead'' in the sale of hand-braided bracelets. The popular candy - decided upon after a school poll - sold three for 25 cents, or the shopper got one free when buying a bracelet for 25 cents.
''The main thing we really thought about was the warhead,'' Damon Ray, 11, said. The candy sold the bracelet, he explained.
The goal of the fair was to earn back more than the $25 investment and spend the profits as the students deemed appropriate - often, with a pizza party.
Whether they made a profit or not, the kids todaywill revisit their products and their sales performances and learn what worked and what should have been handled differently.
''We want the children to see why they were successful, why they were not,'' Miss Moreland said.
Other lessons tie in, depending on the grade level. Curly-haired Sara Holmes, 7, said she learned how to make change. Other kids made hard choices on whether to spend part of their dollar on the popular Blow Pop-paper flower combination from the fifth-grade table or buy sun catchers or jewelry.
''We learned that we need to make something they like and that sticks out,'' fifth-grader Melanie Vaughn said of the flower-pops. Candy sells, she said. And the paper-tissue flowers that encased the lollipops were eye-catching.
Several students learned the lesson of supply and demand.
At the end of the business day, 2 p.m., children in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades sold out of their products, which included the flower-pops and cups of Valentine's Day chocolates. The third-graders almost emptied their supply of plastic lettered necklaces whose square beads spelled ''drugfree'' and ''LLCoolJ.''
The others will decide whether to save their leftovers for an upcoming parents conference. Why pass up a captured market?
And some, including Lindsey Dougherty, will think about growing up and owning their own business. Perhaps a food store, she and a friend mused.
