We had our first carnival last year and are starting to plan this year-we gave victory prizes as well as participation prizes so all kids walked away with something! I used TOYDEPOT.com and found it to be cheaper than Oriental trader. We raised over 3500.00 last year.The bouncy used blew fuses so we stopped. Hot dogs, popcorn and cotton candy went very well. We also contacted the local 4-h in regards to the petting zoo. Also try the fire and police depts in volunteering to come out and pass coloring pages, etc. The cakewalk was a HUGE success-we told parents to bring in WHATEVER-oreos, little debbies, homemade cakes, even bags of candy so each child could pick what they wanted to collect-good luck!
Dunk Tanks are fabulous
Cake walks also bring in lots of money at our school, maybe cupcake walks for the little ones
face painting and
balloon animals
The HTML (web stuff) pulls out any extra spaces. If you want to print it exactly, try using the CODE button. It adds a begin and end tag, kind of like bookends. Put your stuff in the middle and it should retain the format.
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We had a local hardware store donate some building material (MDF & 2x4's). Don't use MDF though if there is a possibility of it getting wet. I believe that our's was 4'x 4'. We cut 3 2x4's to screw to the sides and bottom (to keep the disc from falling out, we actually used those plastic ping pong balls and they worked just fine. We did not use pegs we actually used galvanized nails. We measured and marked the board where the nails would be two inches apart. On your second row you need to make sure that the nails will be in the middle of where the first row of nails are. We left 2 inches in between each row also. I hope this doesn't confuse anyone. Then we cut pieces of 2x4 to section off the bottom so there were different slots for the ball to fall into. At the bottom I painted stars on every other section so the child would know if they won a big prize!! So it looked something like this:
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Sorry to use so many dots, but maybe it will help. If you have anymore questions let me know and I will see if I can help.
Thanks so much for your advice. I have printed out a list of games from the oriental trading website. They had lots of good ideas. I think we are going to make as many games as we can. That way, the school will have them for future events.
PTO-mom-of-4, can you give me any suggestions for building the Plinko board? That seems to be a huge hit after reading some of the past posts on here. I thought we'd use a half sheet of plywood and small dowel rods. I can't find any discs to use with it, though!
All of these tips are great and I've written down dozens of things to take to our meeting next week! Thanks so much!
