Our school had a game night in Feb. We had a puzzle exchange where you could trade your old jigsaws for new ones, provided a ton of snacks, had decks of cards, checkers, chess, candyland, monopoly, trivia, Uno, and tons of other games out for people to use, we also invited everyone to bring their favorite. We held drawings every 20 minutes to give game related prizes, and at the end of the night we gave away a deluxe Cranium game. Everything was FREE, had about 150 show up. Comments I got were mostly: Didn't want to go, kids made me, thought it would be boring, but had a GREAT time, when are you doing another one?
Thanks for thr input everyone!! We had great success with all of our nights (movie, crafts, science etc) but not as much with reading night which is why I am worried about trying game night and havign it end up the same way.
We did a Math night in the Spring which was huge hit with the kids. We had different stations with projects including marshmallow sculptures to tanagrams to seeing how many marbles you could fit into a winter glove. The kids had fun at all the different stations and it was a learning experience to boot. Good Luck!
We do the active games from the PTOtoday packet in the gym and have board games set up at tables in the hall. The "game show" part came for the last hour of the evening and everyone really got into it-even those not selected to play.