Apologies if this showed up twice, got a strange message the first time.
This is just our school's experience and my opinion. Not trying to be negative, just reporting our experience.
We had a moonwalk for 2 years and after 2 years swore we were not going to have one ever again. The teachers and parent volunteers that manned it said it was worse than recess monitor. It is just the nature of kids that once inside a moonwalk kids are going to push one another, or bounce on top of another kid or run around and play tag. The volunteers hated having to yell at kids the whole shift.
Another problem is just the differences in size of the kids. Our school is K-5, so you have kindergartners along with 5th graders and the size difference is too much, the little ones get bounced around too much. So then we tried to seperate the kids out by size and have the same size jump together, but you ran into siblings being split up and kids feeling like that kid got to go before me even though he was after me in line because of his size. When my kids were in daycare the center would rent one, and that went fine because each class would get it for a allotted time, and all the kids were the same size.
The other problem we found was financially it was hard to justify the money to rent it. We have used the theory that the inflatables are needed as a "attraction" to get people to the carnival, but they rarely made money. The moonwalks though hardly brought in any money because you just cannot get the kids through it fast enough. You have to give them enough time to jump, and the loading and unloading takes a lot of time.
My suggestion is to try a giant slide or an obstacle course. We have found that even if we charge one ticket for a slide or obstacle course, that the line moves fast and kids will do it again and again because the line is always moving and it is cheap. We almost break even when we rent a slide or obstacle course, which is all we want.
That was our experience, hopefully other groups can tell you how to have one in a positive way, we just could not get a moon walk to work for us.
This is just our school's experience and my opinion. Not trying to be negative, just reporting our experience.
We had a moonwalk for 2 years and after 2 years swore we were not going to have one ever again. The teachers and parent volunteers that manned it said it was worse than recess monitor. It is just the nature of kids that once inside a moonwalk kids are going to push one another, or bounce on top of another kid or run around and play tag. The volunteers hated having to yell at kids the whole shift.
Another problem is just the differences in size of the kids. Our school is K-5, so you have kindergartners along with 5th graders and the size difference is too much, the little ones get bounced around too much. So then we tried to seperate the kids out by size and have the same size jump together, but you ran into siblings being split up and kids feeling like that kid got to go before me even though he was after me in line because of his size. When my kids were in daycare the center would rent one, and that went fine because each class would get it for a allotted time, and all the kids were the same size.
The other problem we found was financially it was hard to justify the money to rent it. We have used the theory that the inflatables are needed as a "attraction" to get people to the carnival, but they rarely made money. The moonwalks though hardly brought in any money because you just cannot get the kids through it fast enough. You have to give them enough time to jump, and the loading and unloading takes a lot of time.
My suggestion is to try a giant slide or an obstacle course. We have found that even if we charge one ticket for a slide or obstacle course, that the line moves fast and kids will do it again and again because the line is always moving and it is cheap. We almost break even when we rent a slide or obstacle course, which is all we want.
That was our experience, hopefully other groups can tell you how to have one in a positive way, we just could not get a moon walk to work for us.
As first time Pres I'm nervous about our carnival. This year will be sink or swim. We have a lot of people wanting to not do a carnival anymore. So we are doing a few new things this year including tattoos and a bounce house. Any advise on how to manage the bounce house?
