Our classes each do a booth. The PTO of course does the concessions, that's always pretty good. By the way call your local "soda" bottling companies for sponsorship, sometimes they will donate product. We ran a sand art booth at our town's festival this past year. We are going to do that at the carnival as well. It was a HUGE success and I think it will be at the carnival this year. We bought the supplies from a really great company with a yellow background website, just type in sand art supplies in a search engine you will find them.
We ask businesses to sponsor our fall festival. We have some businesses that donate between $500 and $1000. We advertise all businesses at our festival, and we sell t-shirts to the children with the sponsors on the back. All the children wear their t-shirts to school the day of the festival, and also to the festival. This has really boosted our earnings.
We call ours a fall festival. We sell tickets for .25 each or $5/25. The tickets are used for everything except concessions. We set up games, have a cake walk (cakes are donated by parents) have 2 inflatables. Most everyhting costs 2 tickets. We also have an auction but it is not silent, it is a live auction and the basket list the value as well as the contents on the outside. Bids start at the valued price since all items are donated. Each class is responsible for making a basket. The room mother will either get donations, asks class members for items to go along with them or ask for money to purchase the items. Many local businesses donate items that we auction off as well. Our concession are burgers, hot dogs and drinks, most of which is donated by local businesses.
each class would have a theme to do and the children would bring the items, my daughter's classes one did arts and crafts and the other did games, I would have to go and buy items for the baskets, the night before the carnival we(room moms) would come and make the baskets, PTO had their own baskets and we would but the items in the basket, we would have to write down the items that was in the baskets so that when they typed the auction sheets they would tell the parents what was in them. We are just tired of doing this every year and want to try something new. I hope this helps