I was in charge of Family Science Night at our school this year. I worked with the teacher in charge of the high school science club and her kids came and set up 6 different rooms...biology, chemistry, physics, weather, astrology, and forensics. Each room had a variety of things that included hands on activities, crafts and demonstrations. An example was for our forensics room we had little mysteries to solve...who tracked mud into Mr. ___ gym? Who broke Mrs. ___ coffee mug? I had taken mugshots of the "suspects" who were teachers and we matched them up with different shoe prints and fingerprints the kids had to compare with the ones at the scene of the crime. The kids absolutely loved it!!! The teachers who were not able to attend that night came up to me the next morning to ask me if they were the one that was guilty. I worked with the 5th grade science teacher and we had all of the 5th grade science fair exibits up for parents and kids to look at that night. I also contacted a college professor who came and did liquid nitrogen demonstrations and made ice cream with it for all of the kids. The last 30 minutes I used a magician who had a program he does at schools called "Science is Magic". I had him come 4 days before the event to do an assembly for all of the kids to give them an idea what they would be missing out on if they did not bring their parents to Science Night. We have approximately 450 students, K - 5 and this night was the best response of all of the family nights we had done all year. We had approximately 350 people in attendance. We had it in the middle of May and there was a lot of other functions going on the same night or we would have even had more attend!!! (Next year we are doing it in either Feb. or March).
We did a science night last spring and incorporated Mad Science into the program. It was fabulous! Our science night was sort of a celebration of a 10 week long science camp we did with our struggling 5th graders at our school. We met every Friday after school for our camp. Towards the end, each group was in charge of creating a "science fair" type project that covered each objective for the science TAKS. At our science night, we had each group display and explain their project. We did a Mad Science show altogether (45 minutes) - they covered specific areas that went with each objective we were trying to reinforce. Then, we had each group at a station (5 groups from camp) with their projects and 2 Mad Science stations (one was a dry ice demonstration and the other the slime take home demonstration). The families rotated through all 7 stations rotating after 10 minutes. Each person was given a punch card and it was punched after they listened to all the demonstrations and the science fair projects. The completed punch cards were collected in a door prize box and prizes were given out after the fair.
It was a huge success and all the families are begging for us to do this again with this years' camp. The PTA paid for Mad Science to come and they were wonderful. The audience was included in many of the experiments and everyone loved it and learned a ton.
I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about Family Science Night using them but we did use them for after school club last year. Kids (and parents) paid $40 to be part of the club and most of them seemed disappointed. I dont know if it was the age group (K-5) but it didn't seem like there was enough to do and sometimes the activities seemed lame. For example they made paper airplanes to talk about gravity I think but the explanation after the activity didn't hold the kids and didn't seem to make sense or make them care for the most part. We wont be using them again.
Anyone out there do a Family Science Night using MAd Science? I have seen their flyer online and it does look really interesting. I was just curious if anyone has used them and what type of response you received from your families.
