Family Engagement:

6 Low-Cost, Low-Stress, Family Events Your Community Will Love

By Susan Bryant

Building Partnerships for Success

When working with early learners, building partnerships with parents and guardians is an important ingredient in a successful school year. If you want to get more families to participate in school events, make sure your offerings are appealing, fun, and free for families! Sometimes planning these events translates into more work for you and more expense for the school. But, never fear! Check out these 6 ideas for low-cost and low-stress family events!

1. Popsicles on the Playground

Many families today don’t have strong connections with others, which can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation. You can help your families connect with their kids’ classmates and their parents by hosting a Popsicles on the Playground event. 

Simply invite your families to come to the school playground, provide nametags, and let the kids play while the parents and staff members mingle. Provide inexpensive popsicles for everyone. This is a great event to hold at the beginning of the school year.

2. Touch a Truck Night  

Invite local businesses to bring heavy equipment to school for kids to see and touch.  Generally, local fire departments are happy to bring a truck over to your parking lot, as long as they aren’t called away on a run. 

In addition, call a local construction company, a cement business, a towing company, and/or a moving company to bring any piece of equipment they can spare for the evening. Farm equipment is also a hit.  If you don’t know any farmers, contact your local 4H leaders for connections.

3. School Art Show 

Have each teacher choose an artist for their students to emulate in their own art projects. A quick Google search will yield lots of ideas for accessible art activities for even the youngest learners. Check out work by Gerhard Richter, Dale Chihuly, Piet Mondrian, and Yayoi Kusama to get started. Each child’s finished artwork can be matted onto black paper and beautifully displayed in hallway “galleries” throughout your school.

 While families will enjoy browsing the art, you can extend the evening’s fun by including some hands-on communal art activities, like sidewalk chalk drawings outdoors, a mosaic using colorful Post-its notes, and a mural painted entirely with bingo dotters.

4. Storytime Extravaganza 

Invite families to come to school for a storytelling event. This event works at any time of year, but is especially popular on a Saturday morning in the winter, when everyone needs a reason to get out and about. The teachers choose the books to read, retell or act out. Guest readers, such as the principal or even the superintendent, can provide an extra incentive to attend. 

Stories could be chosen around a theme, such as “making friends” or “trying something new” and are a great way to encourage families to head to their local library for some good books to take home.  

5. Family Walk/Run

Set up a course around your school or neighborhood for families to walk or run together.  You can set up large cones with numbers attached to help everyone follow the course.  

As a bonus, you can give each family a course card and have a staff member at each cone to mark off that “checkpoint” on their card. Families who visit each station can earn a small donated prize, like a book or a coupon for a local restaurant, at the end.  

6. Community Service Project

Ask families to come to school to take part in a family-friendly service project. This could be as simple as an outdoor clean-up/spruce-up on school grounds, to card-making for a local nursing home or assisted living center, to doing a project for a nearby animal shelter. For example, you can cut donated t-shirts into strips and have families braid and tie off the strips to make toys for the shelter dogs to play with. Anything that is fun to do and helps others would be a great way to engage your families.

How does this benefit my school?

When parents and caregivers have positive feelings about your school and your staff, they are more likely to call with concerns rather than complaining to others, and more open to the information you share about their child’s school experiences, goals, and learning milestones.  You’ll also be providing opportunities for families to meet other parents in their school community, as well as greet the friends their child plays with at school. And, it can give everyone a healthy outlet for social activities that don’t involve a single phone or tablet. Win, win!

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