By Kate Lohnes

Market saturation and profit margins might seem like over-the-head concepts for a fifth grader. But at Alcott Elementary School, kids are getting a healthy dose of economics from a favorite class project.

According to teacher Mike Mazzon, his three-week Market Place Business Project has become an important part of his curriculum during the past three years. Under Mazzon’s instruction, students develop a business plan and a product to sell. The business plan must have all the necessary business details: the cost of materials, the cost of labor (if parents help), profit margins and more. Then Mazzon, as “the banker,” loans each pupil $10 to make their business happen.

Once their products are ready, Mazzon’s class members sell their products at a marketplace on the school’s gymnasium stage (they also have to pay for their “retail space,” Mazzon says). They peddle their wares to fellow classmates, teachers and staff at the school over a two-day period. They can also sell the product outside school, Mazzon says, as long as the bulk of sales happen at the marketplace. At the project’s end, students must pay back their bank loan but can keep any profit they make.

Mazzon says he has seen a wide variety of products during the project, from cupcakes to Buckeye-themed merchandise to refrigerator magnets. Most students tend to make between $5 and $15 in profit. Mazzon says the record holder for profit, a student who made Buckeye necklaces and also sold them near The Ohio State University campus, made approximately $90 in profit.

“That student understood the concept of reinvestment,” Mazzon says. “This student also learned that he could get more for his product when the target audience was adults around OSU versus students at Alcott. The student sold (the necklaces) for four times as much closer to campus. I wouldn’t have dreamed he could get that. That’s an incredible lesson.”

Mazzon says the ultimate results of the business project teach kids lessons they might not pick up from reading a textbook, such as marketing, supply and demand and market saturation.

“They could learn this in a book, but they wouldn’t keep it,” he says. “I wanted to do something that would be meaningful to them, and from what I’ve seen so far, the kids finally understand. The kids do learn something valuable, and hopefully it’s something they take with them for a while.”

Kate Lohnes is assistant editor of Westerville Magazine.