We also had our carnival a couple of weeks ago and our local highschool seniors were a great help. They worked to earn "Prom Points" and they were there from start to finish. We let them know their names would not be turned in for points until after cleanup! The carnival was over at 8 and we were home at 9!!! We also did something different this year since our canival was on a Thursday night and teachers had school the next day. Our teachers paired up and created a booth. PTO then gave them the profit that their booth made. The teachers were very eager to help then!! Since we had done so well on our 3 fundraisers we decided to do this to boost the moral and we wanted our parents to know the carnival is for the students and sort of a thank you to the parents. The teachers received a Wal-mart gift card for the amount of their profit.

At our school we have also used Key Club members from the High School. Key Club is a service organization that is sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. All they do are service activities, some of them more fun then others and an elementary school carnival (especially one they may have attended)is a fun one. Honor Society is also a good one but the service requirement varies from school to school.
Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are a great idea but I would suggest an age or rank requirement. Boys in fifth grade have just moved up to boy scouts and those young scouts can be little drill sargents when given any authority.
Last year we told parents that their childs classroom game would be shut down if there were no volunteers for a time slot. We reward the adult volunteers that stay to the bitter end (and help clean up) an offer to go to the local (nice) country bar for snacks and a drink afterwards. Ahhh!

We too had a Spring Carnival this past weekend and it was a ton of work, but it all paid off in the end. In reality, three of us planned it all... me, another mom, and one teacher. The previous parent group paid the teachers $100 each to run a booth, which, in my opinion, is ridiculous. If teachers don't want to work the carnival, then there are plenty of middle and high school students that can help out. If you call around and find some kids who are in National Junior Honor Society, they need the community service hours. Boy Scouts also came to help us this year, and they were great. We made a lot of game booths, like tic-tac-toe, milk bottle toss, bean bag toss, ring toss, duck pond, fishing hole, steer roping (it was a Hoe Down), spin art (finally got the fan idea to work), etc.. These booths were cheap and easy to make from scratch, and we had a DJ, glassblower (kids and adults loved this), line dancing, and basket raffle along with various food. I'd suggest cutting down the number of booths if you're stuck for volunteers, and it sounds like you are, if you're doing all the work yourself. We did all the booths and decorations by ourselves, the teachers only had to create a poster with their booth name and number of tickets on it.

We had tons of people show up to attend the carnival, close to 1000 in attendance. The kids were thrilled, it's such a treat to have a carnival at your school. Good luck [img]smile.gif[/img]

Have you thought of asking your local clubs? Or even your fire stations or police station. I did that at our carnival and we had a great turn out. We had police officers in our dunk tank and Members of the local lions club. We had chreeleaders and football players from our high school in town. good luck i hope this helps.

This past weekend was our schools' 6th annual Carnival. Yes at the last minute we started to call middle school kids to run booths that had no volunteers and we also had only one teacher who helped, but it was worth it!! The kids had a blast. We have a company send a moonwalk and the rest we make up. We had 17 games set-up in the gym with prizes if they lost the game. If they won we stamped their prize card. In the lobby we have all the prizes set-up so the kids get what they want. If they have 6 stamps or 20 they pick it out. It is easy to do balloon darts. Also some games where bowling and golf. We had a great one where the kids had to throw toilet paper into a toilet seat. The kids love any games. Good luck

This year the PTO along with myself are turning in our positions. It's getting to hard with the lack of volunteers and lack of the school support. They like the extra events, but no one wants to help. So we have the carnival left, last year we planned a big carnival and it was alot of fun, but it seems like not near as many kids showed up and many volunteers pulled out at the last minute, their excuse was I wouldn't get to spend time with my kids, so we are thinking about giving up the carnival idea, but we fill guilty, so we wanted some ideas on making the carnival fun, but extremely easy from planning to clean up. Any ideas and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Rebecca
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