I remember reading on here a long while ago about somebody whose school had a family reading night, but can't find it anywhere now. I believe, if I am not mistaken, they had each room set up with a different theme and had somebody reading books or portions of books based on that theme (i.e Dr Seuss, Harry Potter, THomas the Tank, etc). I am trying to get this idea started at my school, but would need more information. Like do you set a time limit per room, i.e. you move from room to room every 10 minutes? Do people dress the part? What about different snacks? Can anyone help?

hi there! i can tell you that we have a dr. seuss night at our school. we have different people in each room and they have either 10 or 15 minutes to read a dr. seuss book. we get different people like the town manager(we don't have a mayor) and people from the board of ed. there are also parents or teachers reading as well. it is a huge success. each reader wears a silly dr seuss hat and an announcement comes over the pa when it is time to move to the next room. i believe in all there are 3-4 sessions. then everyone comes into the auditorium and we have a raffle with all of the kids' names that attended. last year my daughter actually won a dr. seuss lunch box! we also serve refreshments but this year i would like to have a bake sale. at the end of the evening, we pass out little goodie bags to all the children. it is extremely fun. i think you could make it any theme but dr. seuss works well because there are so many books to choose from. good luck!

Thank you for the great ideas! What do you put in the goodie bags and who pays for it? Does the PTO put out a lot of money for this or is this leftover stuff from a carnival or something? What grade levels are you? We are now pk-5. That is a large spectrum of readers. We were actually thinking of doing it in two nights, one for the younger ages, one for older. We have about 970 students in all. Any ideas about numbers? We just grew this year from a pk-3 (690 students). Any ideas would be awesome.

although the dr seuss night is run through the school, the pta pays for the goodie bagsand other items. we just put small oriental trading type things in there, just something to make the kids smile. we are a k-6 school with one building being k-2 and the other building 3-6. the total budget we have for it is $250 and that covers the goody bags, hats for the readers to wear, refreshments and prizes to raffle. last year we probably had about 200 people in attendance. good luck with it. it's a lot of fun!

Hello PTO Chair! Our Title I is have their Fall Into Reading October 2 at my kids school. The teachers dress up and read and there are demonstrations of how we use Sing, Spell, Read, Write with our Leap Frog things for k-2, for 3-5 the parents take an accelorated reader tests. We are served with Pizza. Our book fair will also be going on. There are alot of door prizes given. They do have goodie bags but I cannot remember what is usually in them. Bookmarks I am sure, pencils, and perhaps literature on the importance of reading. I am sure there are some fun stuff too. Like Harry Potter stickers or something.

We did a "pajama storytime" night and it was a blast. Parents and some children's librarians from our city's library read stories to groups of kids who were in their jammies (or whatever). It was held in the gym on a Friday night (no school the next day!) and we had 5-6 storytellers with different levels of books. Kids really got into it -- some even had pillows & blankets. We provided simple snacks (popcorn & juice/soda). It wasn't complicated -- there was nothing to give away or win [that also meant less work for us:)]. But families came and had a great time. The library liked it because they were able to plug their kids' programs. (FYI: Our school has about 525 kids. I'm not sure what the turn-out was.) It was over about 8 p.m., still time to get the little ones home early enough.