Carnival Activity Brainstorming: Our Trip to the 99 Cents Store By Anne Ly and Judy Luong We love the 99 cents store. Because of their large selection, we get inspired by so many ideas and the hard part about it is to narrow down all the ideas about what to do. For children, we think that it is important to make the activities fun and stimulating so as to keep their attention and have them remember the fun and excitement and relate that back to the lesson they learn. Something we found that was really great were bags of lollipops that we could pass out with tags of useful information. Perhaps we can incorporate prosocial messages onto the lollipops. We could either pass those out as a prize on its own, or perhaps link it to another activity where there are lollipops with different messages and you want to collect all 3, like how one would collect pokeman cards or baseball cards. This could also be easily used at carnivals for people of different ages and skills because we would keep the message short and to the point and everyone from all over the spectrum would enjoy the treat. This is also effective because we can get a lot of lollipops for only a dollar, we can afford to buy a lot and pass out a lot and really get the word out. Another great item was a bag of 50 paper lunch bags. These bags reminded us of a time back in elementary school during arts and crafts when we would make puppets out of the bag and drew faces on bottom end and could position our hands in it to make the puppets speak. This would be a fun and great idea to incorporate perhaps a short skit about the importance of respecting and helping each other if we, as the facilitators of this activity,had our own puppets and performed a short skit. Then the audience would be able to have time to create their own puppets inspired by the skit and be able to take it home with them. It is important that people know how to work with others and have team working skills, so one idea we thought of a game we’ve encountered previously where people were grouped into teams of 3or 4 depending on audience size. These teams of people would each have a straw and each team would have a lifesaver and the goal of the game is to relay the lifesaver down the line and maybe back again if the groups are small. Because groups will probably have members that are different sizes in height, they will have to adjust and either tip toe or bend their knees to accommodate for the differences. Then, we can ask them to reflect about the game and everyone would receive a prize because we are not trying to promote losers and winners, but to emphasize the importance of working together, which everyone did and helping others, which by playing on a team and cheering each other on, also did. For a dollar, we could get a box of 100 assorted bandages. This caught our attention because of the play on words we could do with bandage’s popular name, band-AID. We thought perhaps an activity could be created where they have markers and are asked to think back to a time when they or someone they know were hurt by a comment made by someone else. It could have been a hurtful word or just someone making fun of the way they talked, dressed, or anything. They would then write the word on the band aid, the word could either be how they felt when someone made fun of them, what the word is, ora positive word to counter the negative they encountered. They could wear this band aid and share their story and reflect about how it is important not to make fun of