I love Christmas and I want this to be widely known! This is my favorite holiday of the entire year. I always start decorating the rooms at home, the classroom at school, even my car and the Christmas trees as early as mid (sometimes early) November. Every year the school where I work organizes a Christmas charity bazaar. It is attended by teachers, children and parents. Teachers and children can have their own table where they can come up with an activity or sell some handmade goods, foods or drinks, all of it to raise money for charity. Then, on December 15, parents come and have fun with the students and spend their money on the items, foods or activities. That money is going to a different type of charity or organization each year.

The 2018 School Christmas Market (bazaar) had a wide variety of tables and activities. Right next to my Technology table was a “School Starbucks” table where a handful of eighth graders and two English teachers were making various hot drinks like cocoa milk and latte, on the spot, serving them in Starbucks cups. There were, of course, many tables of food made at home or on site, such as pancakes, grandma’s cakes, cotton candy, popcorn, etc. There were also tables with activities such as drawing Christmas cards, origami, singing Christmas carols, etc.

I had my own table, which I named “Computer world”. I’ve been preparing for this event throughout the whole month of November. I wanted to represent myself and my subject properly.

You can see a small clip with a few moments of preparing for the bazaar and generally decorating the computer room in Christmas style in one of my YouTube videos at THIS LINK.

Let me tell you a bit about the activities I came up with for my Tech table. Maybe my work will inspire you to join the next school bazaar at your work place.

 

Your elf name

I’d created a program, using C# and Windows forms, which, upon inputting data (first letter of your name and the month you were born), shows you what your name would be if you were a Santa Claus elf. This was done according to the following scheme taken from Google:

When someone came to the Tech table and wanted to know their elven name, I entered the first letter of their real name and the number corresponding to their birth month. After pressing OK, the program displayed the elf name. Then, on specially printed pieces of paper, I wrote the elven name with a marker and handed the paper to its new owner. I have no recollection of the exact cost of this activity, but I think it cost 2 “pwaunds” to participate (the school’s fictional currency, 1 “pwaund” equals to BGN 2 or $1). I made the sheet where I wrote the name on Photoshop and it looked like this:

And the software that I wrote, that displayed the elven name, looked like this:

 

The Christmas wheel of gifts

I bought, soldered and assembled an electronic hobby wheel of fortune -> from this place, click to see <- for BGN 6.90 (around $3). After that, I made the graphic of the prize wheel on Adobe Photoshop again. I printed the graphic on which the wheel was placed. The idea was: when someone wants to play this game, they press the button that activates the “wheel” (the lights going on and off, imitating a wheel effect). The lights light up one after the other, until after a few seconds the light stops at a certain point. The thing the light points to is what the person has earned. There were several awards, namely:

• An issue of the very old and surprisingly interesting (socialism times) Bulgarian computer magazine “Computer for you”
• A Christmas card that’s been made on Paint by the 5th graders in one of the Tech lessons
• A printed and laminated autograph by John Atanasov himself, something that is extremely rare and really cannot be found on the Internet easily (I took it from one of those “Computer for you” magazines)
• A small printed Christmas story book written and formatted with MS Word by a 4th grade girl in our Tech classes
• Voucher for a free cookie from the eighth graders’ goodies stand

This is how the wheel of gifts’ graphic looked like. The wheel was placed at the center of the graphic (where the bow is), and the graphic itself was printed on an A3 thick paper and placed on an easel for easy use.

One spin on the wheel of gifts cost 3 “pwaunds”, which was BGN 6 ($3).

Here is a picture of the wheel and how I had set it up.

Chicken Invaders

The next activity was easy for me to set up and do and turned out to be the most desired activity (after the robots) that the kids lined up for. I downloaded (from the Internet) the Christmas version of the game “Chicken Invaders”, which I loved to play as a schoolgirl (around 2006-2008, lol). Basically, you fly in space and shoot evil chickens, and they drop you gifts and legs that bring points. I set up a chair with a movable table attached, and on it I placed a laptop with the game. The kids were queuing up to play for 5 minutes a time, which cost 3 “pwaunds”.

Robot battle

For the robot battle, I set up an “arena” of about 2×3 meters. I set up the robots from my Robotics club and charged the tablets for the students to control the robots. This activity had no specific purpose, but it turned out to be the most desired and most played in my entire table. I didn’t sit down for a minute because people were constantly crowding to watch or queuing up to play with the robots. The kids just had fun driving the machines left and right and trying not to bump them into each other because I explained that they might damage them. An 8th grade girl and I had also created “armors” for these robots out of plastic cups, but they never came into use and were only used to decorate the table.

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These were all the activities that were on my Tech table. In general, I was the teacher with the most activities and the most enthusiasm 🙂 Maybe even with the longest and most complicated preparation. Just bringing everything from the classroom to the gym where the event was held, took about 45 minutes. In addition to the activities themselves and their long preparation, I also spent time shopping for decorations for the table itself and coming up with decor ideas, such as the stars hanging from the table and the garlands standing on top, because where is the Christmas spirit without a little decoration, glitter and shopping? 🙂

I had a lot of fun at the bazaar and my table made about 400 “pwaunds” (BGN 800, or around $400-$450) in about 4 hours of non-stop work. I’m proud of my dedication and every year I look forward to another Christmas bazaar where I can have fun even more, be creative and raise money for charity. I leave you with a smile on my face from the fond memory I have just described. To finish, I will also show you a photo of the happy me from December 15, 2018, setting up the table and waiting for the first people with Christmas spirit and cheerful moods to arrive.