That is soooo cute! Since we're not fortunate enough to have a pickle plant I quess we will have to stick with the cake walk for this year!! Everyone has the coolest ideas for their carnival! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

The nicest thing about the HoeDown is that by the time it comes (held on a Friday night), the fundraising is basically over. It then becomes a BIG family fun night.

JBH, we are pretty proud of our "Pickle Walk". It's an example of using whatever you can get for free. Until last year, we had a pickle plant about 15 miles away that donated individually packaged pickles for a sour version of the old standby Cake Walk. A family donated pickles last year, but we are contacting convenience stores now to get them donated.

We have about 18 games. We do the usual cookie walk, candy bar walk, pickle walk, bopper hop (those little headband with the things sticking up), fishpond, duckpond, coke ring toss, plinko, jewelry store, marble fishing (picking up marbles with your toes), hockey shoot, torpedo football, tattoo parlor, balloon animals, face painting, putt putt golf, gold mine, pumpkin ring toss, funny photos, and bingo. Our goal is to keep the crowd moving, so we opt for games that move folks in and out quickly.

Hope this answers your questions. If not let me know.

Pottsville Mom, sounds like you have alot of suggestions I haven't heard [img]smile.gif[/img] ! Please, share them all again and I'm sorry if you have already done this once.

Pottsville Mom,

You must mention the "Pickle Walk". It was my favorite of all the things you shared with us!

Instead of just selling tickets, we have a king and queen contest. Children ask friends, relatives, parents co-workers to "vote" for them for king or queen. For each 50 cent vote they get a ticket to play games at the HoeDown. Of about 440 students, we had 53 bring in $100 or more. The top winners are the king, queen, princes, and princesses. Everyone bringing in $100 gets prizes and silly strings the teachers. We make sure no student leaves school without tickets. No way would we sell that many tickets if we just sold them.

We usually do sell another $2000 tickets the night of to middle school students and people wanting to play bingo.

What is the King/Queen ticket sale? Our spring carnival is next month and I remember when I was young and attending our fall carnival, we always had a king and queen!! Is this what your talking about and how is the money raised?