The basketball tournament March Madness is an exciting event that gets students and teachers alike excited. In my school, all students (from kindergarten to 12th grade) and teachers fill out a basketball bracket. The brackets are then added to the school's private group. In morning assemblies, the administrator will announce which brackets are doing well. Prizes are passed out occasionally. At times, the basketball games are shown in the classrooms at the end of the school days. The article titled "
How to Incorporate March Madness into Your Classroom" provides creative ways to implement the March Madness tournament in the classroom setting.
- Figure the Winner: Math (mean, median, and percentage) can used to predict the winning team.
- The Team at Home: The students can locate the teams' hometowns on a map. The class can research the teams' mascots and how they could be related to the geography of the hometown.
- Book Madness (A Tournament of Books): "Ask your school librarian to run a list of the top 16 books most commonly checked-out. Place the books into a bracket starting at the sweet 16 and ask kids to vote. As part of the voting, students are only allowed to participate in the vote if they’ve read the two books facing off. To make sure everyone has access to the books, put any copies of the books on your shelves. As students finish these favorites, they’ll return them to the stands for others to read. In addition to voting for the best books, students will also fill out their own bracket predicting the winners."
- Nothing but Net (The Science of Shooting Hoops): "The goal of this project is to determine if the ball’s starting position for shooting a basketball affects a player’s shooting percentage. In this project, you’ll measure shooting percentage when players shoot baskets from chest height, chin height and over the head."
- Basketball Printables: Teachers can Google or Pinterest word searches, crossword puzzles, coloring pages, and various mazes that feature the sport of basketball.
Those are great ideas to incorporate this tournament in classroom! The students will probably not even feel like they're doing school work because they'll be having fun. Being involved as a class in March Madness will probably be a lifelong memory for some of those students.
ReplyDeleteExcellent ideas. March Madness also lets the students know about hard work. These teams weren't freely given the opportunity to play in the tournament, they had to work for it. And in life and school, it's the same concept, hard work pays off!
ReplyDeleteI love this! In third grade we learn all fifty states, the capitals, and the nicknames. How many college teams mascots are the nicknames? And the places where the tournament games are played are often capitals! (Salt Lake City, Utah or Indianapolis Indiana for example). All kinds of word problems can be made from the spread. We also touch on probability in math. How FUN!
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