Kokomo area shoppers can buy Christmas gifts and support local charities all in one place today at Maple Crest Middle School.

Seventh-graders will have products and services for sale in the school gym as part of the annual economic fair. Proceeds will benefit both the Dr. D. Douglas Hogan III scholarship fund and several local charities.

Teacher Vicki Boles said the fair is the culmination of an economic and entrepreneurship unit, in which students learned how to develop a business plan, analyze the market, create a product or service, then market and sell it. After the fair, students will complete profit analysis exercises.

The fair is open to the public from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. today in Maple Crest Middle School’s new gym. Gift wrapping will be available.

Boles said 50 percent of proceeds will go to the Hogan scholarship fund, and each student group will select a local charity for the other 50 percent.

Boles said the idea came from a conference she attended with the Indiana Council for Economic Education, as well as a class she took at Indiana University Kokomo. The goal is to teach students about what it is like to start and run a small business, she said.

The seventh-graders researched their market, to see what products or services their schoolmates would buy, and chose what they wanted to do. Each student in a group then had to ask six people if their product or service was something they would buy, and if the responses were not favorable, they returned to the drawing board.

“They had to figure out ‘what do these people want?’ to determine the market,” Boles said.

Boles received $350 from the Indiana Council for Economic Education for the project, which was seed money for the young entrepreneurs.

Tyler Emerick, Will Stahl and Jacob Trader tapped into the market for lanyards with their business, “Go Bananyards for Lanyards,” because students are required to wear them with their IDs, Emerick said.

They’ll sell several colors of lanyards for $1 each, and Emerick expects to make money.

“If we don’t sell out, we’ll come pretty close,” he said, noting that they have 200 to sell. In market research, he said, students indicated they might buy more than one lanyard.

Rachel Johnson, Taylor Sparling, Michaela Wade, Meghan McCauley and Emily Skaggs turned their love of jewelry making into “Peace, Love and Beads,” creating bracelets, rings and necklaces from beads.

They’re marketing their products with posters and by word-of-mouth, as well as by modeling their own products, wearing them to school.

They are pretty positive their business will succeed.

“We have a lot of people who said they want them, so we think it will sell out,” Sparling said.

Their jewelry prices range from $1 to $2.25.

Sharde Young, Kiersten Fitchpatrick, Logan Martin, Kyrah Essett and Niairy Daniels are targeting people who are both eco-conscious and fashion-forward, making cloth gym bags out of old T-shirts, and decorating them with bubble art.

Young said they saw other students do a similar project last year, but her group updated it and made it their own by decorating with bubble paint.

Essett said they’ve learned they have to price their bags high enough to make a profit, at $3.

She said the group is drumming up interest in its products by carrying them around school.

Boles said it’s been fun for the seventh-grade teachers to see the students using their talents to develop a business.

“We have just about anything you can think of,” she said, including jewelry, T-shirts, air fresheners, face painting, sign language accessories, chances to play Rock Band II and many others.

She said students also are learning about giving, through donating to charity, and about working as a team. She hopes some will consider careers as entrepreneurs.

“Maybe one of them will be our next entrepreneur of the year.”

• Danielle Rush is the Kokomo Tribune education reporter. She can be reached at 765-454-8585 or danielle.rush@kokomotribune.com.