PTO Today

In response to your reply about the math nights...I wanted to confirm that the company is Learning Gizmos and they do host Math Nights in Michigan and the Chicago suburbs. It is free based on the number of attendees and a portion of the sales do go to the school. Please feel free to contact me about more details.

Nancy

More info on Learning Gizmos please. I tried to find on the internet, couldn't come up with anything. Thanks

Actually the 1% of the title 1 funds set aside for parent involvement activities allows you the option to pay the teachers out of these funds for their services as well as pay parents for their time in running the event. I am chairperson of the parent advisory committee in a K-8 school in NYC and responsible for budgeting the parent portion of title 1 funds. Teacher contracts clearly state that they are not obligated to stay past 3 PM ( 2 times a year are spent on Parent teacher conferences) Any type of workshops for parents or family event geared towards helping parents to help their children at home can be covered using this portion of the title 1 funds.

Do you have to do it at night? We have ours every year during the day. That way the teachers have to participate. It is an all day event with the fine arts teachers and paraprofessionals working with parent volunteers. We try to have at least one school employee at each station with them. We usually have ten stations and rotate. Then the resource teachers and some fine arts do math reading in the classrooms. It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun as well.

One idea that you can try is to separate the families into teams and have them do an "Amazing Race" type event. Start everyone with a math question that the student must answer. Each question has various answers with various locations within the school (i.e. The computer room, a teacher's room, etc.). If the answer is incorrect then when they get to their location it will indicate that they must go back as the answer was incorrect. If correct then there would be a new question waiting for them. Could actually have multiple routes so as not to get too boxed up. If during the day you could actually have them go outside... It would be great to incorporate something like this in the school day so that the teachers can control the kids and have one student answer the question at a time, control the running, etc...

Another one that we've done is an "Are you smarter than a 4th Grader" Math night. Lots of fun, but probably only good for one grade in an evening!

PresidentJim