We just wanted to do a Winter Craft Night, I am waiting on the paperwork, we either have to include all the religions or it has to be totally non religious. So I can't even imagine doing a Santa breakfast and we are small also K-5, 210 students. The only non religious stuff I have come up with are snowflakes and snowmen...so we might just throw in the towel on that one.
Do you have any kind of craft to do? I'm thinking that while some of the kids are visiting with Santa, you might need a simple craft, maybe a few games for the others? Think that even if each child only spends 1 minute with Santa and you have lots of kids, the kids may need something to keep them busy. Just brainstorming..
Shelly
Thanks...e-1
I have sent some of your ideas on to the others and we have decided that we ARE going to use the idea about passing out #1's so that they don't have to stand in line.
We usually have a Halloween Party...but, we let the High School Ball Teams host that this year..it was last night. I think they did well. So this year we are starting the Breakfast with Santa.
We are a small school..K-12 has only 500 sudents.
So we are starting out Small scale this year with it being our first year and NO one has ever been to one we have just heard of them!
We are serving breakfast only from 8-9am...and then Santa as you finish breakfast.
We have to be finished before 11am because we have our town Christmas Parade line-up at 11am.
Sure hope we are allowing us enough time...We have asked some of the Mom's that will Not be in the Parade to stay as clean-up...The parade goes right by the school so no one will miss seeing it..just allot of US main Santa Helpers will be IN the parade.
Love the advice....Keep it coming!!!!!!
This year we will host our 6th Breakfast. We offer it free to all students and very reasonably priced for family members. Under 3 are free. We have breakfast (pancakes, sausage, juice,coffee, milk, fruit) in cafeteria. And "make it and take it" holiday crafts in the gym. I think we have something like 6 stations with different crafts. We also have high school art students come and do face painting. The National Honor Soc. kids get community service credit for it. We have Santa in the gym set up also. In the past we haven't taken professional picutres. We just tell parents to bring their cameras. We have a multi purpose room set up with Santa's workshop. To offset the costs, we offer raffle items. We just have a bunch of baskets that we put together with donated items from the community and gift certificates. We offer the raffles randomly. By that I mean you just buy a ticket and we randomly draw each winner. You don't buy a ticket for a specific item. Our breakfast is always a big hit and so much fun for all of us volunteers. Every year we walk away gratified that each child left with a smile. It is a wonderful experience and very rewarding. I will tell you though, it takes ALOT of hard work and ALOT of volunteers to run smoothly. We try to schedule volunteers in shifts so they may enjoy the morning with their own children. This is the one event that a majority of our teachers volunteer at as well.
We have been to one of these at our church and it was adorable. One thing they did to help with the chaos was to hand each parent a "number" and this was the order that they got to talk to Santa. There were LOTS of kids there and rather than have them stand in line for a long time, they sort of gathered in waves according to their number. They had a church member there taking pictures. It was lots of fun.
Shelly
When my children were in preschool they had breakfast with Santa. It was their biggest fundraiser and soooo much fun. Last year they changed the breakfast to include sausage, eggs and pancakes (made the day before and heated day of), they also had danish, bagels, juice, milk, coffee. It was a lot of work on the volunteers that did the breakfast, but so worth it. The attendees loved it. They had games with candy as prizes, everyone got a prize for playing. They also had a secret santa shop, everything was a dollar, kids shopped by themselves for their family. The items in the santa shop were all donated by the school families that signed up to make or donate somthing. Most all items were homemade craft type things, cookies in jar, coffee, hot chocolate or tea mixes. Some people bought items from oriental traders, avon, just about anything. They also had a silent auction of dontated items they got from the community.
They ran it in two 1 1/2 hours shifts, sold tickets to each shift, left a half hour between for clean up and to set up again.
We were at this school for four years with both kids, they enjoyed it so much. We will go back this year, even though they are both in elementary school now.
