Schools: How to create and run house competitions with groups
Tags: Reading Groups, Staff Actions, Classes & Readers
Note: For more information about creating groups on your school site, check out this article.
Some schools may run competitions where multiple teams or houses compete for a school-wide prize, like a “House Cup.” These houses are made of dozens of students, usually over 40. While groups created on Beanstack cannot exceed 40 students, many schools successfully work around this limit by doing the following:
- Log into the admin view of your school site.
- Draft a school-wide challenge for the length of your program or competition.
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Create multiple groups for each team or house, using a naming convention like this:
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Red 1
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Red 2
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Red 3
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Blue 1
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Blue 2
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A few notes:
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The naming convention is important as it will ensure the multiple groups of the same house are shown in alpha order on reporting, making it super easy to sum up to get a full-house total.
- Adults cannot be added to groups.
- Groups are only editable and visible under Classes & Readers > Groups to the account that creates them.
Tracking progress with reports
When you want to provide a competition update:
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Navigate to Reports >”Groups.”
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Run the “Student Participation Totals: By Group” report.
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Select the correct date range and download the report.
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Upload the report to your favorite spreadsheet program (e.g., Google Sheets), and sum the group minutes to get a total for each team or house.
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Update your school on house competition progress through available channels: bulletin board, morning announcements, social media, etc.
Note: Teachers and Media Specialists can only view data for their own reading groups, while Media Specialists Plus can view data for all reading groups on the site.