It is always really popular among the children, parents and local community so we have to keep the event exciting with new ideas to them coming back!!
Our favourite and most popular stall for the children is the Chocolate Tombola. This is made up from donations that children bring to school in exchange for a non-uniform day. A team of us get together and bag up the donations and number them all up, a fairly big job but it soon gets done. Then there is the adult favourite! The Bottle tombola, parents are always keen to see if they can lay their hands on a bottle of something for later when the children are in bed! Again this is made up of donations for a non-uniform day and takes a small amount of setting up.
The biggest money maker for us is always our main raffle but this is exhausting!! We spend so many hours rallying about trying to beg local companies for prizes to make this a success, sometimes we spend half an hour calling out numbers at draw time as we get so many prizes!! When your PTA sign up to Stamptastic's PTA Rewards Scheme they will receive a FREE £22 fundraising voucher!
The secret room.....a hard room to run!! It involves non-uniform day donated items for a mum or a dad. The children enter the room (without their parents of course) and select a gift to wrap up for them ready to place under the tree on Christmas day. It takes a lot of adults to assist with wrapping the odd shaped gifts with the children. All children are given free rein to choose their own present, paper, ribbons, bows etc and are let loose with scissors and selotape to create the perfectly wrapped gift. We have seen some questionable wrapping skills over the years but the children get such a sense of pride when they have selected their gift and wrapped it for their loved ones.
We have always run a Santa's grotto too which made a lot of money but this took such a long time to organise. We spend a day dressing the grotto, then weeks hunting for the perfect Santa, endless hours shopping for gifts and countless evenings wrapping them all ready for the event. Then even with dedicated time slots per person the queues for Santa are huge and we get lots of complaints! So this year we have scrapped it.......There has been mixed feeling about this and I have to take the blame for it if all goes wrong (no pressure!!) but I have decided to run a Tea with Santa instead for 100 children! Call me crazy maybe but I am hoping that they will all sit nicely and listen to The Night Before Christmas whilst enjoying a hot dog and a drink. Then we will be decorating Gingerbread reindeers and on leaving all the children will receive a small chocolate Santa.
Emily Vandersteen
Emily is on the Committee of her PTA. Her school, Lawford CofE Primary School, Essex is an affiliate in The PTA Rewards Scheme! Have you heard about The Stamptastic PTA Rewards Scheme) In 2018, Stamptastic paid out over £16,000 in commission and handed out over £20,000 in fundraising vouchers! If you would like to find out more please click here If you would like to write a blog post for us in return for a £30 fundraising voucher for your PTA please join our Stamptastic PTA and Schools Facebook Group to find out more!)
