We also had a booth we decorated and took pictures of the kids--alone or in groups. If you use a Polaroid or digital camera you can put the pictures up all around the booth. The kids love looking at themselves. When the party ends, they can take the picture home. It depends on your budget whether or not you charge. We had a lot of film donated, so it was free. We charged the year we used digital camerals because we had to pay for ink cartridges for the printers.
The way we have done it for many years is to ask that each student bring in 2 bags of candy. We use the gym to sell food (hot dogs, pizza slices and soda) and we also hold a cake/cookie walk in the gym. The cakes and cookies are made and donated by parents.
We have about 10 games, simple home made carnival games that we set up in the classroom enterences and we sell tickets for $.25 each. Each game cost one ticket to play. We purchase prizes from oriental trading company to give away to the winners of the games, and everyone gets a few pieces of candy just for playing the game. We try to set up the games, so that everyone has a good chance of winning.
We combine our two schools k - 8, the 6 - 8th graders usually work in the game rooms, but a few of them dress up and play the games. We have a haunted house, usually not very scary and use the older kids to walk the younger ones through it.
The money we raise selling tickets is used to buy the prizes for next year. If we can get some or all of the food donated the carnival actually shows a profit.
Costumes are optional, but more fun, even for the adults working at the carnival. We call ours the Fall Carnival so that we do not offend anyone with the word Halloween.
Hope this helps
I need some ideas and feedback. My co-chair tells me that a few moms have come up to her and asked about doing something for Halloween. You know, the whole, "It isn't safe to trick-or-treat anymore" concern. Which, I totally understand. However, we are probably only going to be able to use either the gym or the cafeteria, not both, as we normally do for these events. This would limit our capacity to about 300. Our school is only pre-K through third and we have 650 kids. One of my concerns is for the people with children in older grades - I myself have a daughter who just moved up to the 4th grade - are you going to tell them, sorry, you can't come and we are not going trick-or-treating either? How could you possibly limit it? Especially when the Intermediate School (4-6) is not doing anything that we are aware of. Other concerns would be, that we have several Jahovah's in our school. Are they going to be offended that we are having a Halloween Carnival? Should we call it a Fall Festival and say that costumes are optional? Do we do a best costume contest for each grade? Do we do it for profit or not-for-profit? If we do it for profit and each game is awarding candy, how much do you charge per ticket? Is 25 cents too much per game or too little? We would probably work something along the lines of "largest" prize gets four pieces of candy, then three, two and consolation is one. What if we did it not for profit and asked parents donate a bag of candy? Most people are buying at least one or two bags anyway (my neighborhood we get 100 kids, so I buy a lot more than that), so what is one more bag? If we did non-profit, would it be okay to have a raffle going on at the same time that we could make some money on?
Just so many questions running through my head about this whole thing. And only 10 weeks to do it all in. Plus we have the fall fundraiser before then and we do a breakfast for the third graders doing state testing. So we are very busy. As I am sure, you all are. So, any suggestions would be very welcome. :confused:
