We do this with candy chocolate hearts for Valentines day.And ghost suckers for Halloween. Another quick idea is if you have book fairs with posters the ones you use for display--raffle them off--quarter a ticket-put your name on the ticket and at the end of the week draw a winner--last year my daughter spent $10 worth of quarters to win a poster that I could of bought for $3.50--but it was fun.
That is a great idea. If your principal is uncomfortable using a halloween theme, you can easily adapt this for Thanksgiving (send an "I'm thankful for you because...") or a Holiday wish at Christmas, etc.
I had also thought about putting a paper turkey on each teachers door, but leave off the feathers. You could sell "Paper feathers" for a buck (or whatever) to the students and they could write "thankful" messages to their favorite teacher. The paper feathers would then be taped on to the teacher's turkey on their door. The money collected could go towards a staff appreciation luncheon for Thanksgiving.
This year we're doing Ghoul-O-Grams. (We typically help the 5th grade with their Val-O-Grams). We have 5 different sheets for the students to choose from. We charge .25 for a plain sheet and .50 with a Halloween-theme ring or we found these way cute sticky hand thingies on orientaltrading.com that we're putting on them. We sell them before school, after-school, and at lunch for 3 days and pass them out on Halloween to the classes. It's an extremely low cost, easy, quick fundraiser. We just print ours out on orange and purple papers. When the kids purchse them (we have one of each on a poster board) they fill out who it's to, from, classroom teacher & room # and a short message. We then mark a C on the back top right corner that they paid for the extra treat on it. I also have 2 big manilla envelopes, one marked "no treat" and the other "with treat". After they fill out the Ghoul-0-Gram we place it in one of the envelopes. At the end of the day, I send the "treat" one home with a mom to staple/tape on the treat and sort the papers into classes. We then deliver them to the classes on Halloween. We do glance at the message to be sure no one is sending a negative message to another student (only happens once in a while) before putting it in the appropriate envelope. We have a student population of 700 or so and it really is a quick $400-500! We send home flyers encouraging parents to send them to their kids and to the teachers as well.
If you'd like me to email you ours, please email me (no me toos!) at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I'd be happy to share.
