I guess just some more education/instruction for your players? Make sure you teach them at the beginning of the game how it works, perhaps model it for them, or have people moving the circle along.

Hi Clara, I’m so sorry I couldn’t do anything sooner, but I was traveling. Unfortunately I haven’t made printouts for numbers 21 to 60. You could always just write a number on a colored piece of paper. Sorry about that!

It really depends on how fancy the donated cakes will be and what economic class of people you are inviting to the event. The cake walks at my grade school I think were $5 a ticket for a chance to win very prettily decorated home-made cakes (mothers had time on their hands back then). Middle-class school in a middle class neighborhood, 40 years ago. Then again I recently attended a bake-sale (auction) fundraiser for the robotics program at a private high school in Seattle. Boeing and Microsoft employees paying upwards of $150 for a plate of cookies. Rich parents expected to shell out for the benefit of the school, the cookies being quite incidental.

Good question, AD. I don’t know if I can provide much help; it’s always been variable when I’ve seen it played, and sometimes money hasn’t been involved at all.

we will be doing this for a fundraiser for an artists group
curious to know how much the tickets ran (per round) as we have 7 different ideas from 7 different board members

Yes, I was thinking you would tape the laminated paper in place with packing tape. Carpet tiles sound like they would work well too, if you could attach a number to them.

I’ve seen spray painting the actual grass before. Maybe you could also find something like those rubber baseball bases? Or maybe you could do fabric or laminated papers staked into the ground at the corners with tent stakes? I’m not sure if any of these would work, just ideas!

Cakes and live goldfish, what a carnival! 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

Vickie, thanks for the tips! Those are great ideas. Thanks for sharing your memories with us, too! 🙂

This brought back a flood of memories of my childhood and my momma who was very active in the PTA at my school.

It would all depend on how long you let the music play before stopping it and letting someone win a cake. You could play the music for 10 seconds, for example, or a minute, or more. The longer you play the music, the longer the game takes and the fewer winners you’ll have. You could always adjust as needed – if you’re running out of cakes, make the games last longer, but if you’re at the end of the carnival and you have extras, have shorter rounds. I guess it would also depend on the amount of children who will be at the carnival. Will you have a steady stream of traffic, or are there maybe going to be times when no one visits the cake walk? Another thing you can do to make the activity take longer is to not start a cake walk until all of the spots are filled – so don’t start the music, for example, when only 5 kids are there. I hope this helps! Good luck!