I live in North Carolina and March Madness is a top priority! Teachers try to find reasons to put a basketball game on the television: examining stats, multiplication facts by 2's and 3's, geography, college and career readiness. Teachers can get pretty creative!
Last Monday during my weekly Teach Like a Pirate group chat on Twitter (#tlap), some pirate teachers shared ways they use March Madness brackets in the classroom. This is a perfect real-life hook for my students. They live in a state that has numerous, top-rate colleges.
I decided to use the list of books we have read so far this year and create a bracket so my students could vote for their favorite books.
I made one half of the bracket fiction and the other half nonfiction. Each day students will complete a quadrant of the bracket. In 18 school days we will be able to declare the winner. I plan on incorporating the Common Core argumentative writing standard into this activity by having students write reasons for their votes. I won't do this every day. I will do it with the first vote in each round.
The fiction brackets will be a tight race between No Flying in the House, Stone Fox, The One and Only Ivan, and Because of Winn Dixie. I predict that the Final Four will be No Flying in the House, Because of Winn Dixie, Titanic, and Rosa.
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