I would love more info on your Muffins with Moms and Donuts with Dads. What time of day do you do this? Are kids invited or is it just a way to get a group of Moms/Dads together to get-to-know each other?

The reason why I love the "Are you smarter" idea is how it plays into the curriculum. Taking questions directly from the children's quizes, class discussions, etc. is great encouragement and helps some parents get a better understanding of what the children are learning.

Regards,
PresidentJim

Jim, that sounds like a blast! We did Deal or No Deal at a Family Night this year and it was lots of fun. Everyone really got into it, yelling at the contestants just like in the show.

Here's the latest one I recently brought up at our meeting...

"Are You Smarter Than a 4th Grader"

This is, of course, based off of the new hit show, Are you smarter than a 5th grader. Since our school only goes up to 4th grade I figured capping it there would work.

The idea is to make this for 4th grade parents and use 4th grade students for the classmates.

Just like in the show, if you haven't seen it, there are numerous grade related categories and questions. For example, First Grade Science, Third Grade Geography, etc. You can get the categories and the questions from talking with the teachers (also a great way to learn about the grade curriculum).

The show can go up to a million dollars. Obviously we aren;t going to do that, but maybe a $100 gift card would be viable for the highest prize (no one makes it to that level in the show)...

In addition, there are lifelines. For example, per the tv show, there's the auto-save where if you get the question wrong but your classmate got it correct, you get credit. Another is "Copy", where you can decide to use a classmates answer without knowing what it is. Lastly there's "Cheat", which lets you look at your classmates answer before you decide yours. Of course, as we don't condone cheating, we would make light of this during the game...

Figured this would be a great night for our graduating class. Flyers can go home and everyone can come out to watch, but only the 4th graders and their parents who wish to play can be part of the show.

In addition this would be a great opportunity to have a bake sale, sell pizza, etc.

I'm even going to go so far as to talk with the music teacher to get the kids to record the "Are you smarter than a 4th grader" music, again just like the show.

Check out the website to get a good idea.

Good luck,
PresidentJim

We do a Pizza and Read Night, This is a great event and continues to grow each year. We have Papa Johns Pizza come to the school sell pizza. We give free bags of popcorn to all the kids. We also have different people within our community come and read to the kids.

We set up class rooms for each of our readers and we spit it up into two sessions. This way the kids get stories read to them by different readers during the night. This is also the night we have our book fair.
As far a the readers go you can ask your local high school drama club(they alway come in costume), football players, cheerleader, school board members and local celebrities. The kid can come dressed in there pajamas.

We start serving pizza at 5:30 - 6:30, at 6:40 our first session of reading starts, them at about 7:10 the second session starts. Papa Johns Pizza will give a % of the money raised back to the school. We give all the money from that night to our library.

You can also do this on a smaller scale and just have the readers come and have a snack for the kids.

We did this for the first time this year -- HUGE...we come from a rural area so not a lot of houses to go door to door. Basically we just invited parents to come with their vehicles, pull them in and open their trunks, decorate around them for Halloween, and/or in them and then the children came dressed in costume and when we started the event they went from trunk to trunk trick or treating. We then had a monster mash in the auditorium. It was a ton of fun.

d