May 29, 1999
Bargains galore at the Chieftain Village Mall
By Cathy Willoughby
Staff Writer
Large amounts of money were changing hands Thursday at Hopewell-Loudon Elementary, and it was the students making the financial decisions.
Fourth and fifth graders in Joni Jordan's and Pauline Reinhart's classrooms ran the "Chieftain Village Mall'' for their fellow schoolmates all day.
"They are doing this to inspire their knowledge of entrepreneurship,'' Reinhart said. "Each one of the groups decided on a product that they were to sell. They had to create a list of materials and a list of expenses. They also had to figure out the number of hours they spent at production, as business people would.''
After determining their profit at the mall, the youngsters will subtract the amount of their costs of production and materials from the amount of money they earned from the sale of the "product.''
Their products varied with the imaginations and ingenuity of the students. Groups of three or four students worked at creating the items for sale, the name of the item, and price. A poster "advertising'' the products was placed in the front of the desks that lined the upstairs hallway.
Some students reported better sales than other. Popular items seemed to be the beanie baby bookmarks, doodle pads in animal shapes, face painting (for a price), bean bags, and crepe paper flowers.
Students in grades kindergarten through six were the shoppers. They each had an assigned amount of play money to spend. "Each room received $600 and the children earned their money through different activities within the classroom, such as behavior control. The teacher kept account of the student's funds in their 'accounts' and the students received their money to shop,'' she said.
This is the first year for the experiment in the free-market system, and the students enjoyed the efforts. "We are studying entrepreneurship and economics in the fourth and fifth grade in preparation of the proficiency test in citizenship,'' Jordan explained. "They learn the factors of production, of supply and demand.''
"The kids have really seemed to enjoy it,'' Reinhart agreed. "And we will see tomorrow what comments they have after they determine their profits.''
"They asked us to make bean bags,'' said Kristen Stahl, fourth grade, of her fellow business partners. "When they said let's decide to make something, I had brought my own beanie babies in. I learned how to sell and how to do a nice career.'' "I did most ofthe cutting and putting the beans in,'' added Donovan Birkmire, also in the fourth grade.
At the bookmark booth, Mackenzie Brickner commented on the success of her group's product line.
"We sold all of the beanie baby ones, and the foam ones,'' she explained. "I thought this would be easy, that's why I picked it, but it turned out to be kind of hard.'' She said that it was extremely busy for a while, making it hard to keep up with her customers' demands, then store traffic slowed down. "They really bombarded us at first,'' she said.