Pwalther, how do you do a junk food walk? We have a way to get lots of donut and ice cream cone coupons. I wonder is we could incorporate those.

I forgot to add if you go to www.schoolcarnival.com (it might end with an s) they have formats for you to use to figure out your prizes and also charts to keep track of everything........great website for planning a carnival.

You can buy prizes from Kipp Brothers for fairly cheep. Here a rundown of how we did our carnival, the top five most popular prizes in each token catagory :

1 token: tic/tac/toe game, sportsball erasers, return balls(they are on a string), giant backscratchers, mini frisbees

2 tokens: ugly teeth, gummi pizza, swirl putty, sticky lizards, shooting fists

we skipped 3 tokens

4 tokens: sticky sportsballs, skyfighters, glow mouths, punch balls, sparking pinwheel

5 tokens: sport gel watch, wristband ball, mummy ptty, 3d puzzle, bike tool set

we skipped 6 and 7 tokens

8 tokens: football flick game, fuzzy pen&pad, jewelry assortment, skateboarders, camo watch

we skipped 9-11 tokens

12tokens: dirt bike minis, nerf shooter, stretch lizard, tensel halo,puppets

skipped 13-15 tokens

16 tokens: fiber optic boppers, heart tin, inflatable characters, canteen, flower pot paperweight

skipped 17-23 tokens

24 tokens (we only had 3 prizes)
gumball machine, inflatable animals (bigger ones), lip blabber radio

skipped 25-29 tokesn

30 tokens: inflatable chair, mini boom box, mini radio

the small end tokens you buy them for about the same amount of 1 tokens worth, you don't make a major profit but the higher the tokens the bigger profit you make. I hope this helps you figure out your prizes.

Carnival Helper,

Well for our carnival, we assign an approximate ammount for each redemption ticket. For example, if your game costs $.25, and the max ammount of tickets given for prizes is 3, then the ticket worth would be between 5 cents and 7 cents.. meaning even if the player hits the "jack-pot" then the game is still ahead about 4 cents minimum..

for redemption, we figure how many people might attend and how much they are going to spend.. figuring out the prize levels, you need to have redemption for as little as 1 ticket and work from there to an approximation of the "standard" winnings.. say 50 tickets... 50 tickets at say, 5 cents would be a prize valued at &2.50... for that you can get stuffed bears from small toys.. or oriental trading... the like.. though we have found that dogs do better than bears.. bunnies are my son's favorite... and kittys are good too..

for instant win games such as "gone fishing" for the younger kids, we figure 12 cents average for each prize when it costs 25 cents to play....

for the older kids, it takes more $$ to play (2 tickets) but they get more in redeption chances as well..

i hope that helped

Does any one have any experience setting up one of these redemption centers without using a company to do it. We're trying to work on this now and can't come to an agreement. How do you determine which prizes goes for what number of tokens. Also which Co. has the best price on redemption tokens?

We us Fun Services for our fun fair. They give 2 options 1) Small prizes at the game - usually junk
or 2) kids get tokens (depending on how well they did playing the game they could get 1 to 3 tokens) at the game and they can cash them in at a redemption table for better prizes. Which your pto could do.
The redemption table had a very wide range of toys. It is hard to remember but maybe 2 tokens would be the smaller junk stuff and it went all the way up to 75 tokens to get stuffed animals and small character basketballs. Again, I am kind of guessing on the #of tokens needed. You could do it however you wanted. We always go through the fun fair co because they bring the prizes and take them back and we only pay for what we use. We have no storage at all for left over prizes to use again next year.
Some items we had were tatoos, pencils, stickers, plastic rings etc., cars, finger puppets, bubbles, chalk, trading cards, inflatable baseball bats, beach balls, various sized stuffed animals, basketballs. Good Luck!