Standing atop the Plinko board Sunday in South Park, Adonis Railing-Tolbert won things that most kids in Lawrence take for granted: clean water, shelter, school supplies.

“That’s important,” 10-year-old Adonis said. “Everyone should have school supplies.”

The Plinko board – a game board where kids dropped wooden, hockey-puck-sized chips through a maze of pegs – didn’t garner any real prizes.

Instead, it helped teach Adonis and other Lawrence children about life for youngsters in other countries – lives that often are without many of those basic, necessary possessions.

Volunteers for Kansas University UNICEF, which stands for the United Nations Children’s Fund, put on the daylong event in the park, allowing kids to run races, paint faces and play Plinko all in the name of education.

“We’ve wanted to have an event like this for a couple of years,” KU UNICEF Vice President Lennea Carty said. “Just a day with kids in the park.”

Many of the day’s events, including a puppet show and a foot race where kids ran holding cups of water above their heads, were meant to educate people about fresh water shortages in Africa and other parts of the world, Carty said.

Jomana Qaddour, Kansas University senior from Overland Park, right, displays an item found during a scavenger hunt promoting healthy living to from left to right Abdulrahman Qaddour 8, Overland Park, Sylvie Uwineza, 6, Lawrence, Janet Mason, KU graduate student, and Sophie Ineza, 2 of Lawrence. The Sunday afternoon event, World Children's Day, sponsored by KU UNICEF was held at South Park.

For the kids, the water race was a chance to get a little wet on a warm spring day. But Carty hoped they learned a lesson as well – that transporting clean water is challenging in areas with fresh water shortages.

“We have it in abundance here, but kids in Third World countries have nothing,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Carty hopes the park games become an annual tradition, providing a more lighthearted event to complement the group’s annual dinners and other fundraising drives.

All of the money KU UNICEF raises goes to the US Fund for UNICEF, the national branch of the children’s fund.

But there was no fundraising Sunday, just kids running from event to event, gathering little silver star stickers for every competition they completed.

And in the process, the group hoped, they began to understand that kids’ lives elsewhere aren’t always fun.

“It gets them out of Kansas,” Carty said.