Host a festival

Pre-Festival considerations

The minimum you will need is time, place, activities, some facilitators, and participants.

Time and place

Think about the setting for your festival. You can look at The Kit in Action for inspiration. A few questions to help you refine your ideas.

Are you using this in a classroom setting, as a stand alone event, or part of a larger event?
Is it one time or multiple times?
How many participants do you expect?
Do you have one table or can you set up multiple tables?
A festival can last between 1-3 hours. If it’s 3 hours, make sure you have extra volunteers so that they can take breaks! 2 hours is a nice length of time, but if you can get set up ahead of time even 1 hour can be fun for everyone.

HERE IS A CALENDAR which shows when the kit is checked out for the next few months. Find your date and send Kim an email asking to borrow it.

Activities

Number of activities: Consider using 10-12 activities with 4-5 stations each for 70-100 or so participants. If you have fewer participants you could use fewer activities, or you could use the same number of activities with fewer stations. Kim can also send ideas of additional activities if you are interested.
Types of activities:

Some are based on logic, shape, or number
Some have beginner options which are more appropriate for K-3 students or younger.
Some are two-player games, but most are puzzles.
Some are pencil/paper type puzzles, and others use manipulatives.

Each activity includes 5 stations. I have used one activity at a time with classes of 15, where students are working in groups of 3 to solve the puzzles.

Facilitators

Facilitators are people who help participants enter into the problems and make progress solving them. They do not have to be experts at these games, just willing to clarify the basic instructions, give hints when people are stuck and encouragement when they are making progress. They also set out the stations, keep them neat during the festival, and put away the stations at the end according to the instructions.

Facilitators could be teachers and resource teachers, parents, or other students. If a teacher is using the materials in the classroom, they won’t necessarily need facilitators for each activity, but you might want to introduce the activities a few at a time.

Each activity will have a link to

Instructions about how to set everything out.
A short video about the game, how to play, and things that participants sometimes miss.
A list of good questions to ask to keep people engaged.
Instructions about how to put the materials away.

There will also be instructions in each activity.

Participants

What you need for your festival might depend on participants. Teachers are more autonomous than students, older students are more autonomous and require less guidance than younger students.
The number of people
Being part of a larger festival might mean that each participant stays at any particular event for less total time.

At the festival

Tables

A key idea for a festival is that

Things to consider

Tickets and prizes. The original festivals
Breaks for facilitators

Post festival

Cleaning up

Inside the document box or bag for each activity, facilitators can find a list of what came with the activity and how to put it away.

Then the festival organizer can look at a checklist to make sure that all the activities are included when the kit is returned.

Reflections

We really appreciate reflections from people who use these materials. They help the sponsors know the impact of their investment, as well as letting the kit organizers know what to try next. Reflections can come in a number of packages:

Pictures. We will never share pictures of students at schools or at non-public places without their approval. But appropriate pictures help bring the activities to life
Was anything broken or missing?
Is there anything that could be improved?