Looking for exciting family events to re-engage elementary school families in your Parent Teacher Organization (PTO)?
This article has fantastic event ideas that’ll wow both students and parents and ;lay the foundations for more volunteers and boosted parent involvement at the same time.
In this article, we’re gonna be covering family events that not only parents will come to, but that will actually freakin’ blow their minds.
I know so many schools struggle with engagement and involvement, and one of the keys to getting families involved, or getting parents involved, is to really have these events that they come to and love.
Once they see the event, they’re realize that THIS is what the PTO actually does.
Not just arrange bake sales or sit in boring meetings.
Fantastic events are really what it takes to get families and parents to understand what you’re (as a PTO) doing and why they should be involved in your parent group.
Start with Communication
Part of really fantastic events is not just the event itself, but communicating about the event.
Making sure that parents know when the event is because it could be a stinking, freaking awesome event, but if nobody knows about it, then they’re not going to come, and they won’t get to experience how awesome it is.
So be sure that everyone knows about the event, and this is going to take more than mentioning it once.
This post has 21 different ideas for publicizing events, so check it out to get inspired with tons of ideas!
Keys to Fantastic Events
Some of the events that families will lose their mind over are actually pretty simple.
It’s not rocket science; they don’t have to be very expensive at all.
That’s not what makes an event really awesome.
The deciding factors are some of the best events that I’ve planned and been to are things that I would enjoy doing with my children but wouldn’t actually do, like a science night.
More on that in a bit.
Another ideas is to take advantage of what’s available in the community.
Every community has different resources available, so don’t be afraid to be a little creative.
Sometimes that’s really what can make it for a group—using something a little outside of the box that really does it for families and gets them to come out for the event.
The other thing that’s really nice is to look for events that are seasonal in nature that require a little bit of extra work to organize to make unique in some way to offer parents.
And another thing to take into consideration is the parents.
The very, very, very best events are the ones where the kids have fun, but also the parents have fun too.
Parents will not turn out for an event if they think it will be a miserable experience for them.
So think about what you can do to make it worth it to them beyond just their kids’ enjoyment.
This might include opportunities to network, meet others, win prizes, or avoid a mess or hassle.
You’ll see what I mean for all of these event planning suggestions in the specific event examples that follow.
Science Night
For Science Night one year, the Family Events Chair planned a spaghetti tower challenge.
The kids lost their minds over this event.
Have you ever participated in this sort of event?
If you haven’t, it’s where you take a box of spaghetti and a bag of marshmallows, and you have groups work together—either in families or groups of kids—to build the tallest structure they can without it falling over.
It’s such a unique challenge, and it’s totally low-cost because how much are marshmallows and spaghetti?
If you don’t want to pay for that as a PTO, as my group did because we didn’t want to be stuck with a bunch of leftovers in case people didn’t come, we had families just bring their own supplies.
We had some extras on hand in case families forgot or decided to come at the last minute, but in the end, everyone was able to participate.
A slight variation on the spaghetti challenge is that, in addition to doing the tallest one, you could do the strongest one.
How you measure that is so much fun and so simple- we used matchbox cars.
You take a piece of chipboard or something like a cereal box, flatten it out, and put it on top of the spaghetti structure.
Then you put Matchbox cars on top because they’re small and will increase the weight incrementally but not too much.
It was really fun to see how many Matchbox cars the structures could support before collapsing.
You can also ask a professor at a local college or university to come put on a mad scientist show to round out the science night.
Really any chemistry teacher could do this, so you could even ask your high school’s chemistry teacher to help out by showing experiments where they change the color of fluid in beakers or flasks for an hour.
Chemistry teachers at all levels seem to inherently know how to put on an entertaining show!
Cookie Decorating
Another family fun event that went over really well for multiple PTAs (both lower and upper elementary schools) is an event that lends itself to being a bit messy: cookie decorating!
The chance to do such an event out of our own home and at school where we don’t have to worry about sprinkles everywhere is a pretty good deal, right?
Work with a local bakery or grocery store to get plain sugar cookies, and then get icing and sprinkles for an evening of creative decorating.
The kids can either take home their creations or they can be a treat for the teachers and staff the next day.
Group Outings
Giving the opportunity to families to participate in activities they wouldn’t normally and in a group setting is a fantastic base for a great event.
Call your high school Athletic Department and arrange for group seating at one of the basketball or football games.
Arrange for group tickets to your minor or major league sporting teams.
Or call your local pumpkin patch in the fall and organize a group hayride through the fields.
Anything along these lines of making an event into a group event and creating community like this is a compelling reason for families to participate in your PTO hosted activity.
School Picnic
One of my best-attended events when I was Family Events Chair for the lower elementary school PTO was a school picnic.
We did a picnic literally on the playground after school at dinnertime.
Doesn’t sound like anything special, but the timing and the extras is what did it for this event!
It was the first Friday of the new school year, so students and families were in the throws of back to school excitement and the chance to meet new friends was a big draw.
The special addition that put it over the top was that we invited the city’s government to participate by sending a fire truck and a police car to the event.
The kids had a great time climbing all over and in the trucks.
The officers and the firemen that came were awesome.
They let the kids turn the sirens on, mess with the lights, and get locked in the back of the police car.
The kids could put their hands up on the bars and act like they were being arrested.
It was super fun for all.
And it’s not something that parents can just arrange on their own, making it extra special.
Bingo Night
Another event that works really well is bingo, and we’re not talking about gambling for money, everyone gets to play for free.
The prizes can be trinkets from the Dollar Store, books donated from used book stores, or incentives left over from last year’s fundraiser.
You get the idea. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
The fun is in coming together and playing!
School Dances
A super simple event that went over so well that we repeated it four times in two years was a school dance- one for boys and their moms or special woman and then one for girls and their dads or special man in their life.
You can update the theme to make it non-gendered, but to make sure everyone would fit in the school gym, we divided the school like that, but you could also have difference dances for grade levels too.
Instead of hiring a DJ, I got a playlist from the school’s PE teacher, borrowed the school’s portable A/V system and projector and streamed the Just Dance YouTube videos on the wall.
Super easy, pretty low cost and the kids and parents had a great time dancing the night away.
Watch this
This video has even more super fun family events perfect for the elementary school age set that your PTO can pull off, even with limited funds or volunteers!
Over to you!
Now you know how to plan elementary school PTO hosted family fun events that’ll draw a huge crowd!
And the more parents come out for PTO events, the more easily they’ll see that this is the importance of PTO.
What all of these event ideas have in common is that they bring people together, and when you bring the parents and families together, they’re going to make connections.
The connections are what’s going to bring families back to the PTA and PTO to participate and get involved as volunteers and leaders, strengthening your group in the long run.
It’s a truly win-win situation!
