Thanks for all your input! I think we will try to have a few presentations by guest speakers and fun activities throughout the year, but not at every meeting. We are coming off some hard times in our group, and hopefully things will continue to improve into next year. I'm hoping to see an upswing in morale and involvement.

Capedad.. you are FUNNY! Our meetings are also all business. Although this year we replaced one meeting with a karate team demo/self defense/bulllying seminar put on by a parent who owns a martial arts studio. He did it for free ( good exposure for his studio), and talked about not only self defense and bullying, but how structured activities are great for the mind, body and soul. It was very well attended, and people very much enjoyed the departure from routine.

The great thing was that we had lots of parents who never came to meetings, so when we did our 10 minutes of " business".. they got to hear it!

I forgot to add that all of our PTO business is really fun, so I don't actually understand the question.

I have gotten to the point where I want the meeting to be all business. Our group has a lot of kids and we always have a lot that gets reported at the meetings. I try really hard to keep it under an hour, but things happen, and lots of on-topic discussion tends to occur when I least expect it.

It would bug me when we'd spent 10-15 minutes on a warm-up activity and then people start looking at their watches after 45 minutes like the meeting was too long. Now I just do a quick intro, we read minutes, and dive right in.

The first meeting or two of the year might be different -- especially if there are a lot of new faces.

The toilet paper game is a good one. We did that at a meeting a few weeks ago. I only took four squares and then found out later what it meant. I so chatty I could've used 10. Others got three and struggled with three things to talk about.

Another one we did in the afternoon was fun. The organizers wrote the names of famous people and places on index cards. Each person got a card taped to their back. We then had to go around and ask Yes and No questions until we got enough clues to figure out which name was taped to our back. I got Anna Nichole Smith.... Someone else got Sponge Bob and another got Mother Teresa. Think outside the box.

I try to maintain a level of fun at all of our meetings, I am know to do team building activities that puts people in groups and they need to figure out something. I do the groups randomly by having the same number of cards with like four colors, they pick a card and that is their team.
this usually takes maybe 15 minutes at most, but it has reallt become an important part of our group, it is like a morale booster that I recommend. One meeting I read "the crayon box that talked" it was about a box of crayons that wasn't getting along, but in the end they all made a beautiful picture together.That night everyone got one crayon and each team had to draw a picture using each color crayon. "When you get together the picture is complete."

I have done a toilet paper game, this is great for the early months, each person takes how many sheets they want. They then need to tell the group that many things about themselves, it is funny because no one knows what they are taking it for. Other things I have done is human bingo, gum drop bridge building, things like that.

Our meetings NEVER go over one hour, and we have them every month. For reference our attendance averages around the 24-26 mark. Have fun with it.