We have a fall festival every year, but it's always a halloween/fall theme. Since we also have a Fun Fair in February which has boardwalk style games and treats, our festival is styled differently. We have pumkin decorating-no paint, but we bring out stickers, glitter, pom poms, markers and the kids have a great time decorating their pumkins. Other crafts are offered and the kids have a great time just doing various crafts that some parents think are too messy to do at home, but kids love! We have a bouncer to them to jump in, face painting, refreshments as well. This past fall, we also featured representatives from our local fire, police, county sheriff dept and a local karate school. October is safety awareness month and we focused on that as well. So kids went home with goodie bags with safety gear AND they had lots of crafts to bring home and display for the fall season. The cost is very low and its a great family day.
We run an annual FallFest - not a theme; however. We run it at Halloween time and run a thrill house (fifth graders design and staff that evening) for the kids. Each room of the school houses a different game/face painting/etc - and we have a silent auction running during the evening. It's a huge event and we make alot during that night. ** We purchase items from Oriental Trading also but realized AFTER placing a large order that if you purchase from O.Trading THROUGH the boxtops marketplace site (if you participate) you get a rebate of sorts from boxtops... just an FYI
I ran the casino night/silent auction for our school last November. It was a great time! We usually just have a theme and a silent auction. Parents say it was getting boring. If I were to do it again I would do wither 1 or the other. Parents were having such good time gambling they were not paying attention to the silent auction. We made 15k less than other years. Now we are trying to make up the difference.
How about "Fiesta?" Is seems to be easy to find mexican and spanish related decorations out there and there are so many foods and games that can be played with that theme.
I've always wanted to do something with the circus theme. Under the bigtop. Play circus music, have a juggling station, hula hoops, balloons, popcorn, cotton candy.