House challenges can range from a 10-minute activity once a week to a multi-day or week event. It all depends on what your students and staff find valuable and entertaining. Everyone loves a little friendly competition, and the ideas below give opportunities for students of all skill sets to participate.

Keep it Short and Sweet

These competitions are short and sweet. They are perfect for quick brain breaks at the beginning of your house meetings or during lunches. The games shouldn’t take long, and staff can easily assign points to winning teams.

The teachers in us love icebreakers (for our students 😜) and we have some games that can help your students quickly get to know each other on a fundamental level while competing with the other houses.

Games Ideal for the Beginning of the Year:

• Find your match - The host calls out for players within the same house to find someone who has something alike, i.e. favorite subject, has the same pet/no pet, is born in the same month, has the same amount of siblings, etc. The house that gets matched up the fastest in each round gets points.
• Birthday Line Up - Have students line up by their birth date. But the catch is they cannot talk! The House that gets it done the fastest gets points.
• Human Knot - A classic icebreaker game. Have the students within houses split up into groups of 8-10. Students in each group would stand in a circle, extend their right hand to the center, and grab someone else's right hand that wasn’t next to them. Then they extend their left hand to hold someone else's left hand that isn't next to them. The group would need to communicate and try to untangle themselves. Their hands must stay latched the entire time. The house to have all of their groups untangled first receives the most points.

Pro tip: Set up a category in your LiveSchool Rubric titled “House Challenges” and create positive buttons for each place with a certain amount of points. That way, you can create consistency between these events and every house gets some points!

Taking Your Challenge to the Next Level

After a few weeks of getting to know each other, it's time to have some fun. With these competitions, you will want to pick an equal number of contestants from each house to participate. Try giving different students a chance to play other games. You can even say, “we need the 3 fastest players from each house.” What they don’t realize is you’ll be looking to see who can make a paper airplane the fastest and not who the fastest runner is.

• Party games - Yup! Think way back when to your 10th birthday party. I am talking musical chairs, bobbing for apples, pin the tail on the donkey, freeze dance, egg and spoon race, and sack race. These are oldies but goodies when it comes to quick games that are still fun to watch and participate in.
• Minute to Win it - Just like the TV show, students and staff can participate in 60-second challenges using everyday items found in the house. Plan out the challenges ahead of time to ensure you have the necessary items for participants. Here’s a link that provides 50 Minute to Win It games for kids.

Time to Get Creative

Some schools like to mix the short games with longer challenges throughout the year. Think of typical school events like homecoming week or a food drive and then connect them to your Houses.

• House Challenge Week - Create a theme for each day of the week and award points to the Houses that have the most participation for each theme. Some examples we’ve seen in the LiveSchool Community include House Pride day where you wear your house colors, wacky sock day, and college day.
• Fundraiser - if your school typically does a fundraiser each year, you can consider incorporating House Points to help with motivating your students
• Food drive - Another typical school event that won’t need much additional planning! Just market it as a House challenge and inform your students of the possible points they could receive.
• Family Fun - A great way to incorporate the entire family is by creating challenges that families can do at home. Based on the challenge, you can choose to have them submit their entries physically or through a video or picture. Then, award points to the students who have submissions or to the whole House with the most submissions. Some challenge ideas include:

• Suck It Up – For this challenge, you will need goldfish, straws, and two plates. Without using your hands, players will need to move goldfish from one plate to the other using only the suction from the straw.
• Rainbow Art - Create your own version of a rainbow out of any materials.
• Self Tower - Build a tower taller than yourself. You can either have each family member build their own or all work together on one tower that’s taller than one member of the family.

Celebrate Your Students Unique Skills

One of the most important things a school can do to promote a positive school culture is to acknowledge and celebrate its students' diverse skill sets and capabilities. Houses have a chance to gain house points by showing off their members’ skills, from athletic abilities to superior intellect.

• Intramural sports - Intramural sports are sports competitions that can be held between houses. The sports change within semesters and depend on the campus facilities. Students can play sports like volleyball, flag football, soccer, and basketball. This allows students who wouldn’t usually make cuts for the school's team to play on their house team. Games won can count as points towards their house.
• Battle of the Books - With Battle of the Books, a group of students from each house would be assigned books to read and attend house competitions. At the event, houses would test their knowledge of the books they had read.
• Mathletes - Cue all the Mean Girls fans, “The limit does not exist!” Mathletes are math athletes who compete in math competitions. The school can hold math competitions among the house’s mathletes. Students who win the math competition gain points for their house.
• E-sports - Esports has become extremely popular over the last few years. People can now watch teams compete in online video games just like they watch teams play football. Houses can have Esports teams compete in a school tournament where they duel the other houses in common games like League of Legends and Minecraft.

Remember the Purpose

The ultimate purpose of having houses is to create school culture that revolves around positive student behavior. Positive student behavior can be your biggest on-going competition through each round of House Cups.

A cool way to keep the momentum of gaining positive points alive is by having house points on screens or TVs in heavy student traffic areas around the school. Students in the hallways or in their classrooms can watch as their house points go up and see who is contributing to those points on the screen. We have seen that this is a huge motivator for students since they enjoy being acknowledged publicly and contributing to accomplishments.

Whether your school is looking to increase engagement in the current House System or you are starting from scratch, these are just a few house event ideas schools can do to build culture and house pride. So pick a few of your favorites, try them out, and tell us how they went!

Want to supercharge your school culture? Check out our guide to developing House spirit and our database of House Name Ideas.

For more resources on Houses check out the magic happening at our partner school: Antioch Middle School.