Math Night's been a pretty good event for one of our elementary schools. Since most PTO members actually wanted to accompany their kids station to station, I had my Scout Troop volunteer that night for one of their service projects.
Love the Art Night idea.... you might want to ask your community's art league or fine arts council for some help. In addition to ideas... they might be able to donate some supplies (if you need 'em) or willing to volunteer some of their time.
Hi all,I'm a new Co-President also. For the last couple of years, our school has had a 'Math Night'. There are about 5-8 stations which are staffed by volunteers. As each student completes a station they get a sticker. The goal is to try and complete the sticker chart. If they bring the completed sticker chart in on the next Friday they get free ice cream. We're going to try a variation of the same idea for our October meeting. We are going to have an Art Night. We haven't worked out all the stations yet...but I was thinking a clay station, paint station. We'll contact the art teacher and get some input from her too. Good Luck! My first meeting is next Thursday...keep your fingers crossed for me. It's our Open House too!!
Cheryl
Our school has a weekly take-home. Everyone know it comes home on Thursday. We don't do a separate flyer for meeting. Meetings are always included on the "upcoming calendar of events" on the front page. A more detailed calendar, to include PTO events, is included on the school's webpage.
The only time anything "extra" might be written is when we have a guest speaker... and then it is never a full page flyer that is sent home separately. We try very hard to keep down the paper cost as we run about 1000 copies of the take-home every week.
We'd probably get sued (or slugged) if we actually tried to put a sticker on a child.
Oh and BellTopMom, love your speaker arrangements, you've just given me two great ideas! Only one I had come up with was one about Drugs and Gangs by our Community Relations Officer (boy did I learn a few things when I heard him 2 years ago!).
Our principal allows us to have a
PTA bulletin board where we post meeting information...we also have a website where parents can check the meeting schedule. Our meetings are scheduled for the year, and are generally on the first Wed of every month (except for Sept and January).
The sticker idea works wonderfully at our school, we use it for mainly the k thru 2nd -- they're easy and it's hard to ignore something stuck on your child. We also try to have several meetings per year at night, the rest in the morning since we have parents with differing schedules. We also instituted a website this year and have a contest to get parents to use it - the lunch calendar is there, and all links like school delays, etc. It's gotten over 200 visits the first two months which isn't bad. Even if you don't know that much about webpaging most of the free servers like tripod or geocities have what they call "page builders" so you can have a nice looking webpage up in no time without paying for a domain name until you see whether a webpage will be useful.
Ok - if those kiddos loose the notes on the way home - then maybe you could have several people placed at the excit door to create several lines.
Then put stickers on the kids (have ready in advance)
example: PTO meeting tonight - 7pm in the cafeteria.
the reminder stickers made up on someones computer - put these stickers on the kids clothing. In fact someone else mentioned these today already but we also used these years ago - ready made up - since all the meetings were at 7pm in the cafeteria.
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