Let me give a few comments because I have recently attended two Fun Fairs where there were several variations on the ticket situation and on the prize redemption.

One advantage of central prize redemption is that you can dedicate volunteers to a room and have them just redeem, slightly cutting down on in-room volunteer time.. The disadvantage of doing "in-room" redemption is that your game staff has to redeem prizes. That being said, our experience is that onsite, in-room prize redemption is the way to go. There are two good reasons for this. The first is that you do not have the lines and indecision of children at central prize redemption. The lines in the prize room were always long and especially at the end of the day. Another advantage of in-room prizes is that you can gear your prizes to each room and "make" some rooms or games more popular. You might have one table in a room with several games if necessary. The best reason for in-room redemption is that you can then count tickets at the end of day and see which games are most popular! Yes we use tickets and total them up at the end of the fair. Tickets, instead of punch cards allow us to do this. With a punch card system you never know what games are popular. We have kept game ticket totals for four years and eliminated older or unpopular games using these totals.

Let me also comment on two other items.

For "cake walk", we have moved do jumbo, movie-sized candy bars. Cakes are too hard to carry around and too hard to solicit in quantity. I like the idea of cubcakes, but our Fair does have a separate bake sale and we wish to have no competition for this. Have your baking volunteers bake for a bakesale instead!

Finally, our raffle, done at the Fair time runs quite successfully using the following method. About five weeks before our Fair, we send a solicitation to all students asking them for their parents to send in a small cash donations - typically $3 - $5. These are collected for a classroom and someone then is given the task to go shopping for a theme. We usually collect $30-$50 per room and then send a mom out shopping on our theme basket - say "BBQ". They then use the cash to purchase the raffle prizes and place them into old, donated wicker baskets (these are usually tied up into cellophane to minimize petty theft on raffle day.) . Our 660 student school grosses $2500 per raffle using this method and it minimizes us going out and having to solicit local business for prizes. Yes we still get those, but their prizes usually work quite well within a theme "basket". For classrooms getting $10 or so, we combine two or more rooms and get a basket from combined rooms.

Good luck,

A dedicated Dad

We just completed our Carnival. For the past two years we have had a Book Walk! Everyone loved this idea! We sent a not home asking for gently used books to be used for the book walk. We had a great response and a great variety.

For the groups who have done the Pop Toss with the 2 Liters - did you buy them or ask for donations?

Same with the Pet Adoption - ask for donations??? How successful was this? And then how exactly did the game/station work?

Thank YOu!

We have done both the prize redemption table and the prizes at each game. We too bought cheap prizes to hand out at each game when the kids played-. We controlled how many prizes each student got...We did not do tickets for this but charged a $2 admission and when admission was paid the kids were given a card on a string they could wear for a necklace with the numbers 1-15 and each game was numbered. When the student won at a game and a prize was given to them the game number on their card was marked out. They could play each game as much as they wanted but could only win one prize per game. Still they got 15 trinkets.
When we did the prize table --the tickets were bought for 25 cents each and when the students played a game and won they were given two "prize"tickets. Prize tickets were taken to the prize table ---counted and then the prizes picked out--we had prizes ranging from 1 tickets to 50 tickets. It took along time at the table--my advice would be have alot of volunteers for this--we had 8 volunteers and we have a school of 350 students. We had a line for the table all night and still a line an hour after the event was over. We also ran out of alot of the prizes--we had kids with 100 tickets buying up all the 1-5 ticket prizes. And we had alot of students who after waiting in line had to leave because it was taking so long for the students in front of them to get done--so some left with nothing. And we had alot of kids loosing their prize tickets because they would leave their baggies somewhere.

When we do our cupcake walk we make boxes out of tape on the floor in a square and put a number in each box. Everyone walks around to the music --when the music stops you stop on a number. Someone draws a number from a bag and that person wins the cupcake. You could do the same thing and instead of a cupcake the number winner gets a book. Or you could have each square named after a childrens author or a story book character to go along with the book theme.

This may sound silly, but what's a cake/boot walk?? We are planning a Fall Event and would love something new, (or at least something new to us!!) Thanks in advance for the answer!!

If doing a redemption booth -- have a prize of the minute (ie for 10 min - the big plastic bugs that go on your finger is XX redemtion tix plus you get a thing of Smarties (you all love Shawn) (the little circle sweettartish looking candy) OR have your children or whomever's working the booth near by talking about a certain prize for XX minutes- "Man, that mummy finger is so gros (you all love Shawn) s and waaay cool!!!!) it'll cut down on the 15 - 30 min 'deer in the headlight' shop OR rotate prizes every 30 min (ie 10 of the 30 prizes out on table) -- suggestive selling and subliminal (you all love Shawn) suggestive selling and subliminal messages. Everyone just needs a little nudge sometimes to make then go faster or help decide.