Bertha...let me see if I can give you a little help. We have had a fall festival this will be our 4th year. We have two co-chairs, what happens is one is in charge of craft tables, the other the games. We do have a couple of meetings prior to the meeting, the first one is to get ideas and the second to finalize and cut out stuff that is needed for it. The co-chairs over see it all but alot of people step up and bring stuff, prep game stuff, etc. We generally have like six games for different ages, and like 3 or 4 crafts. Since we do this at no charge For prizes we allow each child to "win" three prizes, they can play as much as they want but only get three prizes. Prizes come from oriental trading and we try to get stuff that can be used at other events if we hvae left overs (pencils, stickers, yoyos, bookmarks, stampers,etc.) We have a ticket station at the front door that each child gets their hand stamped and gets their ticket, the ticket has on it three squares for each prize, a balloon art, face painting, and sometime snack (this depends on how expensive our snack is) as they get that item it is stamped.
As far as volunteers what works great for us is we have name tags and station signups, as volunteers arrive (at least 20 minutes before) they take a station and put on their tag, by having the signup sheets we can see where we need the help as the volunteers showup. If you are short volunteers chcek with your high scholl honor society or even student teachers, our fall fest takes between 45-50 volunteers.
Snack can be something as simple as cookies, we have done popcorn, decorate cupcakes, make your own trail mix, make your own carmael apples (UGH), etc.
We have the advantage of setting up during the afternoon after lunch is done, we run it from 6:00-8:00 and we also have pick up for our fall fundraiser this night, gets rid of that stuff easily! If this is your first fall fest what we did was do a rsvp our first year, we sent home the flyer like 2 1/2 weeks before, got a count and added 50 kids. our first year we had 167 kids and their families, last year in our third year we had close to 375 kids and their families.
There is another post under school/family events called fall fest there are ideas on there. Have fun it is worth the effort...
