By Sophia Wiener
SHREWSBURY – How do you teach community involvement, business skills and fourth-grade English all at once?
In 2024, when Shrewsbury Borough School (SBS) teacher Tanja Larsen taught Jaqueline Davies’ “The Lemonade War,” she was inspired to bring the book’s story about a pair of feuding siblings settling their differences through a pitched battle for lemonade stand superiority into the real world.
The result was Shrewsbury’s own Lemonade War. Rising fifth-grade students, as well as their friends and siblings, used what they had learned to pitch four tables across the borough and hawk the tart-sweet summer beverage. The result: almost $3,000 raised for the Shrewsbury Hose Company and the Shrewsbury Police Department.
This year, the latest crop of rising fifth graders continued the tradition.
On Aug. 14, dozens of students staffed 10 tables from 1 to 3 p.m., raising $4,239.14 for the Shrewsbury First Aid Squad and the Shrewsbury Historical Society. The stand at the corner of Sycamore and Trafalgar, staffed by Flynn Lillis, Emerson Foote, Teddy Huthwaite, Elisabeth Sergeant and Lia Loucks, raised the most money – $587.89 – narrowly edging out the second- and third- place stands at Sycamore and Colonial and at Arch Brow Bar at 782 Broad St., which raised just shy of $580 each.
Each table was staffed by several student “employees” who joined together to create handmade signs, spread flyers and work with their parents to create and decorate the stands and supply them with lemonade. “To prepare, we created a couple of posters and talked about what our best-selling techniques would be,” explained student Juliet Swersky. “We also got together the night before for last-minute preparation.”
As the sun beat down, neighbors flocked to the stands. Supervised by a handful of parents and teachers, the students called out to passing cars and waved signs, drumming up business for many of the students’ first charitable contributions.
That wasn’t true for every student, though. Some SBS students volunteer through their school to spend time with senior citizens at Sunrise at Shrewsbury, a senior living center where the students also set up a lemonade stand during the battle. Three of the children staffing that table, rising sixth-graders Joey Howard and Felix McDonald, as well as Felix’s brother, rising third-grader Dylan, were returning participants who’d staf fed the most popular tables last year and came back because they’d enjoyed the experience. Getting to cheer at trucks to honk their horns didn’t hurt, either.
“Lemonade stands are fun!” said student Max Arauz. “It’s a cool way to help the community earn money.”
For the SBS fourthgrade teachers who taught the book, like Larsen and Kelsey O’Connor, the event has special meaning. “Reading that book with my kids was like a core memory,” O’Connor said as she supervised the Sunset table, looking back fondly at an-other year of graduated students. She also highlighted how reading the book while thinking about their future stands encouraged students to engage with the story in new and different ways.
For Larsen, who left her job at a New York City school in search of a more relaxed and close-knit community, the Lemonade War is just another way she’s tried to make lasting memories by bringing ideas out of the classroom and into the community. Last year, after two of her former students raced around the world in “The Amazing Race,” she set up a version for her own students, where they raced around Monmouth County to look at monuments and experience its history.
“One of the goals in fourth grade is to foster community involvement,” said Larsen. “Going to school shouldn’t just be academic learning; it should be a process, and it should be an experience. They should be able to look back on fourth grade and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did so many things that enhanced our learning and took what we already knew to the next level.’ ”
The article originally appeared in the August 21 – 27, 2025 print edition of The Two River Times.
