During the week of February 4, Morgan County Primary School kindergarten students participated in Tiny Town, an annual event at the school for approximately 10 years. Thirteen kindergarten classes set up and ran individual businesses for about one hour each morning Monday through Friday. Each room designed its own store front with prices listed at the door. Students took turns shopping and selling. They practiced skills such as using money, greeting and interacting with customers and developing good work habits. The children earned kindergarten money to spend the following week. At the end of each shopping day, students counted and posted their stores’ incomes.
Students visited all of the stores over the course of the week. Each student had his or her favorite stores which he or she could revisit at the end of the week. Here is a list of the classes and their stores:
•April Bone, A&A Florist
•Agnes Jones, PB&J Café
•Pansy Paxson, Fireside Books & Hot Chocolate Shop
•Debbie Permar, Panda Nail Salon & Shave Shop
•Ellen Beckham, The Nature Store
•Megan Malcom, The Dollar Store
•Donnis Davenport, MCPS Pediatrics
•Lucy Bennett, The Sweet Shop
•Mindy McHugh, Disco
•Mattie Saffold, The Card Shop and Post Office
•Shelly Ewing, The Hardware Store
•Martha Welch, Movies and Popcorn
•Kathy Moorhead, Under the Sea
Although Tiny Town is a Morgan County Primary School tradition, its activities easily meet the new Georgia Performance Standards. The primary focus of the project relates to social studies, but the academic areas of language arts and mathematics are also addressed during this popular, hands-on unit of study. Examples of standards from each of the areas covered are:
•Social Studies
“Students will describe the work that people do…, [and] will explain that people earn income by exchanging their human resources for wages and salaries…, that people must make good choices because they cannot have everything they want…[and] will explain how money is used to purchase goods and services.”
“Students will demonstrate an understanding of good citizenship.”  (Students earned money by following school rules and practicing good character traits.)
•Language Arts
“Students use oral and visual skills to communicate.”  Elements underlying this standard include: “listen[ing] and speak[ing] appropriately with peers and adults; increase[ing] vocabulary to reflect a growing range of interests and knowledge” and us[ing] complete sentences when speaking.” (These skills were used throughout the course of the week as students learned proper ways to ask for things they needed as shoppers and to greet customers as workers.)
•Mathematics
“Students will connect numerals to the quantities they represent.” The element underlying this standard for Tiny Town was “count[ing] a number of objects.”
“Students will use representations to model addition and subtraction.” An element underlying this standard is “us[ing] counting strategies to find out how many items are in two sets when they are combined.” (Students counted their own money to find out how much they had to spend; they counted the money their stores earned to find the total incomes each day.)
Tiny Town makes for a busy two weeks of preparation and shopping, but middle and high school students regularly return to visit MCPS and will often express fond memories of their own experiences during this special week. When first graders hear that Tiny Town is set up once again, they will often say that they wished they were still in kindergarten. In addition to happy recollections, teachers hope that students will retain and build on the skills they learned during Tiny Town.