Great news! We'll be adding Family Arts & Crafts Night to our School Family Nights series very soon. Crayola is an excited sponsor and will be working with us to create great tools for your groups.

The announcement will be in our October issue (and the Web site updated also in October)and the Night kits will be available after January 1st.

If any of you have 5 minutes, Crayola has posted a survey online to help us figure out exactly the best materials and tools for Arts & Crafts Night. Your help will help us build another neat tool for your parent involvement efforts.

The survey is at: http://www.crayola.com/survey/sredirect.cfm?sid=62

I'd also love to get your general feedback here in the forum on the concept of Arts & Crafts Night. Is this something you'll use at your school? Do you like the idea? Any tips or suggestions? As always, all feedback more than welcome.

Thanks,

Tim

hey there! i just finished the survey. as for a family arts and craft fun night, i would love to do something like that in our school. however, we don't have a lot of income in our school so it would have to be a low cost event and that is always difficult. i am very interested in hearing all about this though and look forward to trying to implement something at our school. ironically, we are having our first annual family fun night next week and i have been racking my brains for craft ideas for the kids! if anyone has any ideas, i would love to hear them. thanks!

We host a Multi-Cultural Event in December, which is a craft night +. We have craft tables with materials, samples, and a craftmaster who helps the kids make the craft. We tried to choose ideas that weren't too expensive. Having a theme helped us be more focused in what we did. First, we went through old storage boxes and found felt, sequins, buttons, fabric, etc. We got rid of what we couldn't use and kept the good stuff. Try to get donations from Beverly's, JoAnn,s (craft and fabric chains), Target, Walmart, Ben Franklin, or any place else you can think of for your materials. Get Costco to donate cookies and juice. We charged 25cents for each craft and the cookies/juice were free. We had about 10 crafts. Get a donation of paper bags and have kids decorate on way in to put their treasures in.

We also used this opportunity to have raffle baskets and holiday plants for sale. The parents have time to look while the kids are crafting.

Hope this helps.

You can also order the craft kits from Oriental Trading. They have the kits with all of the supplies included. They even break down the cost of each craft so that you can adjust your cost to the parents before you assign one set price. We are thinking about doing this also for the holidays and are thinking about asking each class or each grade level to make a different themed basket that we will raffle off during the family night. The theme basket idea came off another thread here on the website. :eek:

Bravo Tim!! Great find!!! This not only sounds like fun for school but I'm going to show this to my church!! They want to start a family night and I'm on tht committee,too (moving from a dinner plate to turkey platter ).

This is a great idea!!

Here's an idea for you and it could make you some money in the process , for other projects . I want to team a child with his or her parent , guardian , or grandparent . They would either come in together one night or one Saturday . They will draw or color a picture together . Our principal and PTA board has approved this project . It is a good parent involvement thing , that includes parents in a school activity .

We may or may not have independent judges and give awards for some of the pictures . All pictures will be displayed in the school halls . ( We may let the kids and teachers vote on the best pictures .) You will need paper . That is not so expensive . You can either buy crayons or colored pencils . You can put those in recycled ice cream buckets , spaced along the tables , for sharing . Wal-Mart may help you with supplies if you put in a written request , explaining the project . The left over supplies can be donated to the art class or classrooms .

Here is the other thing you can do : There are companies that take the art work submitted to them and they make magnets from them . The magnets are sent home for preview , along with ordering information . You can buy that magnet and more magnets or other products with the art work on them . These products make great Christmas presents and this is a great art fund-raiser , because your organization gets a percentage from the sales . Depending on the company , you may have to send the unbought preview magnets back . Our Art teacher does this fund-raiser for students only . He uses Art By Me , which can be found on the web . I have seen one in the PTO Today magazine that lets you keep the preview magnets free.

Of coarse it is all on a voluntary basis . You can send home a survey or entry forms , so you can plan your supplies .