Alright, here's what we did last year for our first Harvest Party, which we are getting ready to hold again...
1. We held it close to Halloween and allowed the children (and parents and staff) to wear costumes. The rules were no masks at all, and nothing gory or scary. We wanted to keep it fun for all ages. Mind you we are a K through 4th school, so age appropriate was the point...
2. Since we didn't want to "force" the kids to wear costumes we made sure to not award prizes for anything to do with the costumes...
3. We charged a minimal amount to get in, just to cover the cost. It was $3 for one child with a family cap of $5. Adults were free.
4. When they came in each child was given a set of tickets, which included one for each party game and one for the "spook house".
5. The party games were as follows:
- Bean bag toss. I took an 8' x 4' 3/4" plywood board and drew a large pumpkin on it. I then cut it out, including the mouth, nose and eyes. I then painted it to look like this huge pumpkin, keeping the theme harvest.
- Gourd bowling. I purchased a set of those plastic bowling pins, and then purchased a bunch of different sized gourds. The kids had three chances to knock over the pins using the gourds, which rolled all wacky. This year I want to purchase plastic gourds as the real ones got mushy after a little while.
- Pumpkin Ring Toss. Using around ten different pumpkins, all with a large stem, that we had donated from the local nurseries. The point was to ring the stems.
So the kids came up with the tickets and played the games. Depending on how they did they got their tickets into the free raffles, which were for various prizes, including WebKinz. If they didn't ring any pumpkins, they put their one ticket in. Got one ring got them an extra ticket. Two rings got them 3 and all three rings got them 5 chances. Being that the raffles were free giving extra chances costs us nothing extra...
- The "spook house" was difficult. I took my old pool cover (black) and cut it so that it could be hung from the ceiling using plastic tie wraps. We also purchased one of those air blown spooky tree decorations for the entrance. We used a bunch of hay bales, corn stalks, pumpkins and gourds for our first room, which we called the pumpkin patch. We used some of that plastic "do not enter" ribbon to shut off the entrance and to provide the start of the line (which ended up going the entire length of th cafeteria for most of the night). This year I have obtained a pedal driven air controller which we will be conecting to an air compressor in order to "blast" the kids with very low pressure air, through a grate, which will have some stringers attached so that it "flies" up. Just a minimal, fun startling affect. Nothing scary. The second room was the mad scientist's lab. One of the dads dressed up in the lab coat and gelled his hair up, put glasses on, etc. We had a bunch of neon stuff in the room and used black lighting. There was a static orb the kids could touch, and they could look through microscopes at things like spiders and snake scales, etc. The mad scientist had a helper, Igor, which helped the kids sit down and use the scopes. The last room was the witches den and a pair of "old hags" were brewing a concoction and needed help. The ingredients were in containers labeled, but the kids could not see in. Some things were spider eyeballs (mushy grapes), zombie teeth (dried corn kernals), etc. We had a big cauldron and had smoke machines.
- We had a DJ and a couple of DJ games throughout the night. One was the "Mummy wrap" game where the kids would have to recruit one adult to be their partner. When the music started the kids took a roll of toilet paper and wrapped the adult. First one finished with the roll wins. Mind you we used a box of tp from the school and they use those industrial sized rolls, so it took forever. This year we buy our own tp. Also, to help facilitate clean-up have a bag of plastic rings, you know the spider, pumpkins, etc. Announce that whoever helps cleanup the wrappings gets to take a handful of rings. The rings were also used as concellation prizes for the games. We tried the monster mash freeze game, where the kids had to stop when the music stopped. But I found that every time we tagged a kid to "get out" they would find their way back in, so the game instead changed to the "best" monster mash dancers. This year my plan is to have them dance "like a monster" and the best five, as picked by a panel of PTOers and the Principal, will take the stage with the audience deciding who wins. Another game we tried (at a different event) was to have the adults compete to win their kid a Webkinz. The hula-hoop contest was a blast. I went with the adults instead of the kids because there would just be too many kids wanting to hula. This way the first 10 adults get to compete. Once down to three hoopers (for some reaon the moms seem better at this than the dads) we had them hoop off. I had them each start with 3 hoops and whoever keeps them all up the longest wins.
- We also had our first bake sale at last year's harvest Party in years. They were not allowed under the past Principal as she didn't want to deal with the whole nut allergy thing. I came up with the idea of "No nut tree products" and requiring them to be individually wrapped and the ingredient list displayed on the table. This worked out perfect as the line for the Spook House ran right past the bake sale, which brought in $350. We sold water, juice pouches, popcorn, and the baked goods, as well as all of our apparel and spirit items.
- I did find that many of the parents wished that they could purchase extra tickets for the "free raffle", so this year we may have that option to raise a bit more $.
overall this event was wnat most parents proclaimed as the "best ever". The kids loved it, the parents loved it, as well as the staff. It was great to have some of the teachers there dressed up in costume to hang out with the kids. This year I plan to have our mascot (I ran a special fundraiser last year in order to purchase a husky mascot costume) come to the party in a costume (maybe a super "H" with cape and such. The kids should enjoy that.
We had news coverage from all of the local papers and the articles were great. It got all of the other schools in the disrtict to start asking "why can't we do that?" If anyone wants to know how I worded our description of the "spook house" or anything, just send me an e-mail.
Also, since this will be our second year we want to try to change up the "spook house" area a bit, otherwise the kids will be saying "it's the same as last year". One idea I have is a wizard's castle, or something like that, instead of the mad scientist, but I'm looking for other ideas, so please post anything you might have.
Thanks,
PresidentJim
