Is your school looking for a way to build stronger connections between home and school? Hosting a family learning night is the perfect way to bring families together for a fun and educational evening at school. Whether you host a literacy night, math night, or STEM night, the night provides opportunities for families to engage in hands-on activities, discover new learning strategies, and leave with tips and ideas to apply at home. 

Tips for Organizing Family Learning Nights

Depending on the size of your school community, you may need to host several different learning nights divided by grade level, each with a different theme or topic. For example, kindergarten and first-grade families could have a themed night focused on early literacy activities. Second and third-grade families could learn about math while fourth and fifth-grades focus on STEM. 

Holding family learning night events on different nights also allows older students to volunteer to run events for younger students. This is one of the volunteer opportunities our student council organizes each year.

Family Learning Night Passports

One of my favorite ways to organize a family learning night is passport-style! Wayyyyy back when I was student teaching, I helped organize an IB Family Learning Night, and families went to a variety of different locations throughout the school to complete activities. It was a HUGE hit, and it was so easy to set up! THIS post has a passport template (and great activity ideas, too!). See a list of some of the activities we did below!

Family Learning Night Activity Ideas

The perfect family learning night activities are low-prep, easy to understand, and require just a few materials. Our goal is to give families new educational ideas they can easily implement at home! 

Literacy Family Learning Night Ideas

I helped organize a snow-themed literacy night for our school. This was grant-funded, so we found a local theatre company that connected stories and tales with magical life-sized puppets. They did a presentation, showed the coolest crank-style movie, and engaged all the kids so well. As they left, we gave each family Ten Ways to Hear Snow and Over and Under the Snow (Amazon affiliate links) and this free parent handout with family writing activities to complete after reading the books. It was so well-received, and it was very low prep on our end!

You could also use these lesson plans to further extend Ten Ways to Hear Snow in the classroom! It includes:

• 5 Days of Complete Lesson Plans for SEL Integration
• Before, During, and After Reading Discussion Prompts
• Morning Meeting Greeting Cards
• 5 Peaks and Pits Social Scenario Cards
• Extension Activity Suggestions

Reader’s theater is another low-prep activity that is always a hit with students! Print a set of seasonal scripts and introduce families to a variety of literacy skills, too!

You could play a game of Human Scrabble using themed words. My students love playing this during back-to-school time. Will families be up to the challenge??

A game of BINGO is always fun and you can differentiate the theme based on grade levels. Younger students can play sight word BINGO and older students can play genre BINGO. 

You can hold a book tasting in the library to introduce favorite new authors, book series, etc. You could also share a variety of book lists for each grade level as a free handout.

How about a little detective work? Prep one of these seasonal inference mysteries to turn families into detectives as they solve a seasonal case. They will explore a series of clues, take notes, and make inferences to solve the case!

Math Family Learning Night Ideas

Play a popular Jenga-style game that combines Topple Blocks and math. Download these low-prep Topple Blocks games and you’ll be set! Families will use colored blocks with math questions. When someone pulls a certain color, they must answer a question that corresponds to the color. You can learn more about playing Topple Blocks games and download a free set of elapsed time cards in this post.

Task cards are another low-prep way to play a variety of games during family night. You could set up color-coded scavenger hunts based on grade levels, use the cards for a game like Candy Land, play a game of Scoot (this would be a HOOT with parents!), play a game of Jeopardy, etc. 

Logic puzzles are another great enrichment activity where upper elementary students can really shine as they challenge their parents!

Our Inspired in Upper Elementary Facebook members also had several great ideas for math activities. You can visit this post to read them all.

• Play addition or multiplication Yahtzee with six or ten-sided dice. – Joni
• You can use a regular deck of cards for math games. Lower grades (K and 1) play Top It to see who has the bigger number. Middle grades play Addition Top It, adding 2 cards together to see who has more. Higher grades can play Multiplication Top It.  -Robin

STEM Family Learning Night Ideas

Challenge each family to build the tallest structure using spaghetti and marshmallows, blocks, index cards, cups, etc.

Try a challenge like Saving Fred to rescue a gummy worm.

You can visit this post in our Facebook group for more STEM activity ideas. 

• Construct aluminum foil boats with pennies to build the best boat that can carry the most pennies. – Ellen
• If you want it to be an authentic STEM project, meaning that it truly is engineering, try doing an activity where it can relate to a real-life problem-solving situation. The ones suggested above can do that too. For example, creating a pulley system that rescues somebody (there’s a Rapunzel stem activity out there that gives you directions for this) or bridges or boats that can hold the heaviest load or a structure that holds the heaviest load. Anything related to energy sources and movement. Also, give parameters around time and supplies. – Carolan

More School-Wide Event Ideas

Our school-wide events team plans several more activities that are fun for students, families, staff, and the larger community. These events are used as incentives, academic boosters, fundraisers, etc. I love seeing school communities come together, so you can visit this post full of fun school-wide event ideas beyond the typical movie/pizza party!