JEFFERSON CITY, MO. ? How do you know when to use a dessert, dinner or salad fork? What about a cocktail fork, soup spoon and butter knife, too?

Sixteen local children shyly walked into the Governor’s Mansion one recent morning for a lesson in formal manners. They wore their Sunday best, saying “please” and “thank you.”

Terry Allen, upper left, teaches Missouri children the correct placement of cups, plates and silverware for a formal dinner as part of a class in manners at the Governor's Mansion in Jefferson City, Mo. Other classes dealt with formal oral and written communication as well as good table manners.

They rotated through the dining room, hallway and sitting rooms on the mansion’s first floor. Mansion staff taught them table manners, table settings, written communication, verbal communication and body language.

The half-day manners classes, titled “Put Your Best Foot Forward,” are open to anyone for a $50 charge that benefits the Governor’s Mansion preservation fund. They are being offered the last four Wednesdays in July.

At the first class, children learned that the main key at the table setting is remembering to start on the outside and work your way in. Three girls and 9-year-old Gerhard Schnieders sat a round table adorned with china settings, silverware and crystal-clear glassware.

Schnieders learned to seat the three ladies.

“It’s difficult when you’re the only gentleman at the table,” said their teacher, Mrs. Thomas. Ladies have their own trick at the table: They shouldn’t put all their weight on the chair when a gentleman is seating them. “You don’t want to hear him grunt,” Thomas added.

After that session, Schnieders said it was “a little difficult to learn to seat the ladies at the table.”

In a sitting room near the mansion entrance, four young ladies learned appropriate body language. They sat in an S-shape with their hands folded on their laps as Coni Riley and Saundra Allen taught them to stand up from a chair when greeting someone.

When entering a building, the most senior or “most important” is to enter first, Allen explained. That is, unless a man and woman enter a building; then he must open the door.

Eleven-year-old Erin Swisher of Columbia said her mother didn’t make her attend the manners’ training. She came on her own. “I learned how to sit at a table and eat, how to be polite and respectful,” she said. “The kids at school aren’t respectful,” she added.

After two sessions, children went through a receiving line. They placed petit fours and finger-sized cookies on glass plates. They were joined by their parents or an adult at lunchtime to show what they learned.

The class was taught to share the mansion and teach young people to be more confident in a social setting, said Missouri Mansion Preservation Director Mary Pat Abele.

“Etiquette helps kids understand how to treat other people,” she said.

Former first lady Jean Carnahan helped start the manners classes two years ago. Abele said 150 families had tried the program.

“Once they have experience here, they can go anywhere,” she said.