Are you ready to wrap up the school year with a really fun event sponsored by your PTO (Parent Teacher Organization)?
How about a family friendly program sponsored by your school’s parent volunteer group that’s sure to draw a crowd?
Today, I want to tell you all about how to plan an end-of-the-school-year picnic, which totally fits the bill for both of these things, and more!
A school picnic is a family fun event that’ll probably turn into a tried and true annual event because of how fun and easy it is to plan and attend.
The atmosphere of the end-of-the-year picnic, in my experience, feels kinda like a field party, a kid-appropriate field party that is.
The end of the school year picnics have always been a very jubilant time because it’s an opportunity to relax and appreciate the end of the school year with fellow friends and school families.
Let’s dive right into all the details about how to plan a school picnic hosted by your school parent group!
Best Timing for an End of the Year School Picnic
The one thing about planing an end of the school year picnic is that choosing a good date can be hard.
But this will likely be the hardest part of the planning process, so don’t stress too much!
And that’s because the end of the school year is a very, very busy time of the year with outdoor / Summer sports already in full swing, and taking up a lot of families’ times throughout the week.
So, when choosing a date for the end of the year picnic, look for a date that doesn’t conflict with as much as possible.
Check with the other PTOs and schools in your school district area to make sure that you’re not picking the high school graduation day or a similar big conflict.
And know that you’re never going to find a date that’s free and clear of everything, but just do the best that you can to maximize the amount of families who will be able to attend.
Best Location for the End of the Year School Picnic
The end of the school year picnic is a great event to take off campus, especially if your school is cramped for outdoor space.
Look at the baseball and soccer fields available at the upper schools in your district and see if you can reserve one to host the picnic.
By this time of the year, school athletic are likely done, so the fields aren’t being used by the teams for practice or games, so you’ll probably be in luck.
Going to a different location away from your school is a good idea because it can just make the whole event seem more fresh.
And that’s because families won’t be accustomed to going to that location and so it will feel different- because it is!
If you do host the picnic at another school, make sure that you have bathroom access, especially if you have younger kiddos attending.
Otherwise, the lack of available bathroom will dampen the fun.
Prioritize making sure you have permission to use the bathrooms on location and make sure that the custodians have the building open.
Also be sure to requests some large trash cans to ensure the space is left as it was found.
Make a game of having the kids race around to pick up wrappers and jukeboxes younger kids have left to leave the space tidy.
Budgeting for the School Picnic
Depending on your budget, you can really flex the meal aspect of the picnic event to fit a couple of different formats.
If your have the budget, then maybe your PTO can order pizza and have families bring sides, desserts, and drinks.
But if you don’t have the money, then you can just invite everyone to bring like a potluck and make it into a buffet style potluck meal.
Another option is to invite everyone to bring their own dinner and plan to eat together in community.
If you’re going to be asking families to bring food to share, please, please, please make sure to specify what families should bring, especially if you don’t want everyone just to bring a dessert.
Giving them a just little bit of guidance because chances are undirected parents will default to bringing dessert.
Definitely not the biggest deal if this happens, but a bit of encouragement to bring a non-sweet side can be enough to ensure you don’t end up with pizza and cookies for the meal and you can avoid sugar crashes.
You can even be even more specific with requests for what each grade should bring: Kindergarteners bring an appetizer, 1st Graders brings not-sweet sides, 2nd Graders bring dessert, and grade three brings juice boxes.
Activities at the School Picnic
Aside from eating, you really don’t have to plan any formal activity at the picnic.
Hurray for this because at the end of the year, no PTO volunteer really wants an overly complicated or involved event to manage, right?
The picnic can be just a casual evening of community and togetherness where the kids play on the field and parents supervise the kids and chat amongst themselves.
Ask families to bring are their own chairs, because you’re going to be outside probably, and kickballs, soccer balls, frisbees, outdoor play equipment that just makes a really relaxed time.
Because you can kind of toss the kids and the toys in the field and tell them to have right at it and watch as they play together in some structured but rather unstructured play time.
Publicizing the Picnic
Once you have a date and location secured for the picnic and have figured out the food and activities, the next step in the process is to let parents and families know about the event.
Send out a flyer, or at least a digital flyer if your PTO has moved to paperless communications, that gets sent out to everybody, including families, teachers and staff.
Do it well in advance so people can re-arrange their schedules to make sure they can attend.
This is the kind of event where people are going to need to make plans for, especially if people need to take off work early a little bit, in order to attend on time.
Watch this!
Give this video watch for a end of the school year picnic planning overview:
Over to you!
And that’s really all that’s involved in planning an end-of-the-year-school-picnic hosted by your PTO. I do hope that you will try hosting this sort of event because it really is so much fun.
Again, this is one of those events that you can really scale up or scale down with food and activity options to best suit your PTO’s budget and your families interest level and needs.
I think it works best through the elementary years since kids middle school and beyond aren’t too interested in hanging out with their families, in public at least!
