8 Quick and SImple Classroom Carnival Games

Hi everyone! Our summer rec program has finally come to an end. I say "finally," but it feels like it went by extremely fast this year! I still can't believe it is over!

We usually go on field trips on Fridays, but for our last day of the program we had a carnival at the building instead. We have done that for the last few years... it is always a really nice, casual, fun day. We have a catered lunch for kids and staff, rent a few bouncy houses, and just party the day away!

I was so busy all summer that I pretty much had to whip up these carnival games at the last minute. I thought I'd show them to you, because a lot of the carnival game ideas I found online were really elaborate, things that looked cool but would take a lot of time, effort and money to put together, even for a backyard carnival party or something. But my carnival games were super simple, yet fun. They'd also be easy to turn into a "Carnival of Learning," which is something I used to do during the week of Independence Day when I taught ESY.

Here's what I had.

1. "Bozo Buckets." I came to the realization that most people who didn't grow up in Chicago don't have any idea what "Bozo Buckets" means. Since I grew up in Chicago but no longer live there, I had to explain this to a lot of people... you've probably played the game but called it something else. "The Bozo Show" was a kids' show that used to be on in the mornings, where they did a bunch of different skits and stuff. One of the things was Bozo Buckets, where two kids from the audience got picked to play. You had to start by throwing a ball into Bucket 1, and then Bucket 2, all the way up to the last bucket. If you missed a bucket, the game was over. For each bucket you got, you'd get a prize, and the prizes got progressively bigger until the "Grand Prize" which was in the last bucket.
My version was simplified. I only had four buckets, and the player could toss the ball into any bucket they wanted to. If the ball went in, the player won the number of tickets that was on the bucket! If you wanted to turn it into a learning game, you could write words or math problems on the ping pong balls and have the player read the word or solve the problem before they threw it.

2. Ring Toss.  I made rings out of glow sticks. I usually use a plunger as a target, but I couldn't find it this year. The one I have was bought new for the purpose of the game, and I decorated it so it looked more like a festive game and less like something meant to unclog toilets. Since I couldn't find it, I just used a roll of cling wrap. It worked quite well! The player threw the four rings, and however many rings they got around the target, that was how many tickets they got.

3. Jokers Are Wild, which was really just a bunch of playing cards taped face-down to a poster board. Players had to take a random card. If it was a Joker, they got 5 tickets. Any other card was 1 ticket.

4. Ball Toss. This just involved tossing balls into holes. The smaller the hole, the more tickets the player won!

5. Airplane Throw. Here we have a fun game, the object of which was to toss a paper airplane through the ring. You could use a hula hoop as a ring, but since our gym equipment had already been packed up, I just twisted a pool noodle into a circle and duct taped the ends together. This game is trickier than you might think. My airplanes kept going over the fence! To win a ticket you had to get it through the hoop.  To make it more fun, you could have the kids make their own paper airplanes to throw through.

6. Pick a Duck. I wrote numbers on the bottoms of the rubber ducks. The players had to randomly choose a duck, and win that number of tickets. Unfortunately the Oriental Trading Co. ducks I had kept tipping over. The Dollar Tree ducks had better luck.

7. Stone Drop. This game involved dropping a stone into a bin of water, with the hope of getting it to land inside a tiny cup at the bottom of the bin. Harder than it sounds!

8. Sucker Tree. This was a popular one! The players would choose a sucker, and if the bottom of the stick was colored green, they got a ticket. But if not, they still got a sucker out of the deal, which was why they enjoyed this game so much!

I was also going to have a water balloon basketball toss, but I ran out of time. I'll have to save that idea for next year.

Anyways, the kids got to turn in their tickets for prizes, just like at the arcade. I only had two categories of prizes... the bigger prizes were 10 tickets, and the smaller prizes were 5. Of course you could make it more complicalted by having more levels of prizes, so kids would have to spend more time figuring out what they could "afford."

Anyway, that is the end of our carnival, and the end of our summer rec program! Next week I start training for my teaching position. I can't wait! I'm still going to try to enjoy whatever is left of the summer, though!