I know that your date has past but I wanted to share our experience with you:
We has a similar version of Family Night, we had Date Night. The parents dropped off their kids and paid us to babysit. We only had 40 kids but that was plenty because we also only had 2 volunteers! Plus the PTO board members. We came up with the idea of having a local Girl Scout Troop come in also. They need to have a certian number of hours of community service to complete for a badge. They played with the kids and kept them happy. The adults pretty much mingled and supervised.
We barely covered our cost of the whole thing because we had to purchase games, crafts and snacks. We are a new school and did not have any of this. We are planning to do it again in December for a shopping day.
We had our first Family Game Night last night. We also did not have people RSVP so had no idea how many people to expect. We planned to hold it 6:30-8:00 with group games from the PTO kit in the multi-purpose room to start and then families could go off to play different board games in 3 great rooms throughout the school. The board games would be raffled off at the end of the evening.
I must tell you I was very nervous to see that there were about 6 cars in the parking lot at 6:25, most of those the volunteers (we had one mom to call the games, and one parent volunteer in each great room to oversee the activities).
We started with mom and dad calling, and about 6:45 when we did the shoe relay there must have been over 100 kids and parents!
We provided water and snacks. While I see ways we could have improved, I think it went over quite well for the first attempt.
WE are holing our first family fun night in two weeks. We have maybe 6 vounteers. We're totally winging it and am not sure if our first event will be big but we're hoping it will catch on. I nvever thought of having anyone RSVP. I think peopole have a fear of commitment these days so we're hoping they'll just come on a whim. What kinds of activities do you have planned? WE are enetring new territory. Thanks, Jenae from Macon, MO.
I was in the same boat last yr. for our family fun night. I usually needed at least 90 volunteers to pull it off. I did it in 1/2 hr. shifts.Due to budget cuts, they restructured our school so I lost some volunteers I always counted on. I didn't have enough, so we had to announce we were canx. Those poor kids were crushed, some always looked forward to it & the new ones were looking forward to it. Needless to say those great kids went home & begged their parents because I got calls all weekend.....so we got to have our FFN.A week later we found out they were closing our school. 19 members.. that's great. we had 4 last yr. I undertook the whole FFN event by myself because of the kids. We had kids show up that didn't even go to the school anymore but loved FFN. Chin up & go for it. Those kids will be smiling & talking about it for a long time. I know, I see some of those kids & they remind me of how much fun it was.
Naw, it kept logging off, then only half the text would be there.
No biggie, figured it wasnt a censor/or innapropriate content issue.
There's always a few packets lost in cycberspace during an upgrade (must go where the lost socks go)
<font size=""1""><font color="#"black"">Liberalism is not an affilation its a curable disease. </font></font><br /><br><font color="#"gray"">~Wisdom of Shawnshuefus</font><br /><br><font color="#"blue""><font size=""1"">The punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to take part in government, is...