I know this is coming too late for the previous posters, but here's what we did at our very first Family Game Night last year. We did not charge admission, and we provided lemonade plus finger-food type snacks that required only a napkin (pretzels, chex-mix, cookies, Goldfish, etc...). It was on a school night, and ran from 6:00-8:00. We asked families to bring their favorite board games, dominoes, chess boards, Twister, and so on, and to mark their name on their games. We encouraged everyone to come, whether or not they had a game to bring, as PTO officers and some of the teachers brought in extra games to use. We set up in our cafeteria, covered the tables with white butcher paper, and tied helium balloons at the ends of the tables. On each table, we placed a bowl of crayons, and encouraged everyone to draw, doodle, keep score or whatever. For added interest, I had challenged the vice principal to a game of Twister. We ended up each selecting a team of 3 students to compete against each other instead. Upon arrival, we had given each person a ticket for door prize drawings. We used leftover fundraiser demos and some spirit booth items for prizes. At the end of the evening, we saved the papers from the tabletops, and hung them on the walls, as many people had written nice comments about the evening, and there were lots of cute drawings and signatures.
We also utilized Honor Society students from the high school to help man the refreshment table, door prize ticket table, and to just mingle with the families and offer assistance if some kids needed help or a partner for their games. This helped us a lot, and even the board members got to relax and enjoy the event with their own families. I still made it a point to work the room, greet families, and generally see that everything was going smoothly.
If you have any back-issues of PTO-Today magazine, there is a write-up of our Family Game Night in the March issue ( I think it was March--maybe April?)
