Your kids may be too young to know the first thing about running a business, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn! Teach them all about scouting a market, creating a great business model and earning money with this fun and educational activity.

Spring is the season of vibrantly colored flowers, musical ice cream trucks and heated baseball games. It’s also the season of the yard sale. These homespun markets, each of which features a household’s hoard of forgotten treasures, dot neighborhood lawns every weekend. Cash in on the front-yard retail storefront by using them to teach your kids invaluable life lessons as they open their very first business.

First, spend a weekend canvassing all the local yard sales with your children. Before you set out, though, give each of your kids a rating sheet to use after every yard sale you visit. Each yard sale you visit is represented by a letter, A through D. Instruct them to give each one a score for each important business factor, with 5 being the highest rating and 1 being the lowest.
The rating sheet can look something like this:

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Tell your kids to be on the lookout for these specific components, and then start scouting! After leaving each yard sale, have your kids score it in each category.

When you’ve made the rounds of all the sales in the neighborhood, go home and review the rating sheets with them. Talk to your kids about what made them favor some yard sales, why they gave higher scores in different areas to certain ones, and which business practices they saw that made them want to hightail it out of there without buying anything.

After reviewing the rating sheets, tell your kids they are going to be hosting their very own yard sale!

Talk to them about ways to build on their experiences. Ask them how they can incorporate everything they’ve learned to create the ultimate business model and the perfect yard sale. Be sure to observe their planning, but do not interfere or offer suggestions. For them to learn what works, they need to own their decisions.

And then, watch proudly as they set up the best yard sale in the neighborhood!

Review their success with them when the sale is over. Discuss what worked, what didn’t and how they can do even better next time.

Congratulations! With just a little extra effort, your young entrepreneurs have learned how to create a business!