We just finished our annual carnival and we brought in over 20K after expenses. We only spent about $5,000 on everything. We had a petting zoo, pony rides, 4 bounce house's, slides, maze, hay ride, dunking booth, and a lot more booths.
What we do is we have each teacher pick out a booth. Then it is up to those teachers and room parents to man the booth during the carnival. Our carnival is from 3 in the afternoon to 7 pm. Most parents will sign up for about 30 min each time.
To get the prizes and concession goods we ask local companies for there support. We also have an ice cream party contest between each grade level on who can bring in the most candy, soda bottles, and prizes. We talked to our local newspaper and they run an ad for us for 4 weeks and we put there subscription information on the back of all our flyers we send home with the students, so we are saving money on advertising. We also give each student that brings a cake for the cake walk on the day of the event 2 tickets for each item.
Some of our booths we have make over $1000. Our cake walk brought in $1400, the soda bottle ring toss made over $1200. We spread out the soda bottles to make it a little more difficult. We start planning our carnival in august and we have it the 3 sat. of October. Our carnival committee is set up with a carnival coordinator, a game coordinator, concession coordinator, prize coordinator, and under writing/donations coordinator.
Most of our concession stand is hotdogs, chili cheese hotdogs, nachos, chili cheese nachos, ice cream bars, coke, diet coke, sprite, water, bags of potato chips and those big dill pickles. We didn’t over charge on anything. i.e. our drinks were one ticket (50 cents per ticket) We try to get as much as we can donated by Albertson’s, Kroger, wal-mart, and even car dealerships.(most give drinks) Now out side the concession stand we had some booths selling cotton candy, popcorn, funnel cakes, and snow cones. Every year we buy one machine to help us from renting one. We own our popcorn machine, snow cone machine, and our chili/cheese dispenser. We have bought them off e-bay. Every year again we add something to keep people coming back.
Now I don't know how big your school is but we don't have 400 students in our pre k-6th grade classes. We are a town of about 2000 people. We get the whole community involved in the carnival. We also try to get the mayor every year in our dunking booth. If you have any questions I am more then happy to help in anyway I can. Good luck.