A total of 83 schoolchildren from Camp Creek and Ottway elementary schools on Friday delighted in the chance to grind by hand their own corn meal and taste homemade butter at "Kids Day" at the Greene County Antique Farm and Auto Show at the Greene County Fairgrounds.

The third- and fourth-graders, 48 from Ottway Elementary School, and 35 from Camp Creek Elementary School, visited numerous stations set apart on the fairgrounds that included everything from a mule-drawn straw baler to quilting demonstrations, plus a lot of antique tractors, and other machinery.

The Antique Farm and Auto Show continues today and Sunday. It opened to the general public at noon on Friday.

Highlights for the weekend include a Kiddie Pedal Tractor Pull and Race on Saturday at 3 p.m.

There is also a parade of antique tractors on both Saturday and Sunday, at 3:30 p.m.

"It was real informative," third-grade Ottway Elementary School teacher Karen Palmer recalled on Friday after schoolchildren had completed Kids Day activities at the fairgrounds.

Palmer said she thought her 10 students especially enjoyed "the hands-on things" at stations such as cranking meal from corn and using an antique saw machine to cut 2-inch-by-10-inch pieces of wood.

"A lot of things I didn't know," Palmer admitted, in recalling the educational aspect of Kids Day.

Holly Gosnell, a fourth-grade teacher at Camp Creek Elementary School, said reactions from her 32 students varied.

"Some were amazed (and) in awe of some of the old ways" of doing things, Gosnell recalled.

"They loved stripping corn cobs and grinding their own corn meal. All the hands-on, sensory things they enjoyed."

She added, "They got to see the whole process" of making bread, "and many were intrigued." Prior to Kids Day, Gosnell said, her students "thought bread only came from Wal-Mart."

A total of five teachers and 83 students from the two elementary schools were broken into four groups that took turns visiting stations at the fairgrounds during Kids Day.

They learned a variety of things involving: wheat thrashing, a mule-drawn baler, a horse-drawn corn grinder, hit and miss engines, antique wringer washing machines, apple butter-making, freshly churned butter, chair bottoming, a quilting demonstration, wooden bowl-making, antique tractors and other machinery, antique cars, horse-drawn plows, antique toys, a cider mill and other crafts exhibits.

"They had a good time," concluded Debbie Cox, secretary for the Greene County Antique Farm and Auto Show.

"The odd thing is that the boys, rather than the girls, asked the most questions about the quilts," Cox recalled.

According to the event's guidebook, nearly $50,000 collected in prior years from donations at the gate, advertising in the guidebook and ticket sales for the pedal-tractor events have been donated to charities since June 2008. This is its 13th year.

Of that amount, $16,225 has gone to Shriners Hospitals for Children, $15,725 to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, $4,500 to Southern Appalachian Ronald McDonald House, $2,700 to the Jonathan Taylor Scholarship Fund at Northeast State Community College, and $10,400 to other local charities, according to event officials.

Ingles Markets donated lunch for the visitors (100 hot-dogs and buns); Union Temple Free Will Baptist Church cooked the hot-dogs and readied them in their buns; the Relay For Life Team at Wal-Mart donated drinks; and the Antique Farm Show Tractor Club donated chips and cookies, Cox said.

Organizers of the three-day event state in their guidebook that, "Our goal is to operate for charitable and educational purposes by fostering and encouraging recognition and appreciation of rural life prior to modern times, and aid in collection, exhibition, restoration and preservation of equipment, machines, tools, implements and artifacts."