Bringing Lessons to Life

Make sense of ‘March Madness’

You can score a “slam dunk” with your class this month by incorporating the annual NCAA basketball tournament as a theme. Even your students who don’t follow “March Madness” will enjoy these lively lessons.

Here are some ideas to get started:

1. Involve students in decorating the classroom (or at least a bulletin board) with pictures depicting their favorite teams. They can draw, print pictures from the Internet, or bring in collages constructed from magazines and newspapers.
2. Put the names of all the teams in the tournament into a hat. (You can find them through an Internet search or the sports pages of most newspapers.)
3. Have each student draw a team name. Assign students a project to find out as much as possible about their teams and the colleges they represent. Students can do reports, create posters, etc.
4. Sharpen geography points. Put up a large map of the United States. Have students put stickers on the geographic locations of the teams in the tournament. Talk about where the teams come from and if certain geographic regions tend to have more tournament teams.
5. Hone key math skills. Encourage student predictions about which teams will win and by how many points. Ask students to take turns charting or graphing these predictions each day. Have another student (again, rotating each day) chart or graph actual statistics. Compare them and talk about how well the class did in its predictions.

Reprinted with permission from the March 2007 issue of Better Teaching® (Elementary Edition) newsletter. Copyright © 2007 The Teacher Institute®, a division of NIS, Inc. Source: David Lamers, “Hooping it Up,” a February 2004 article from Teaching Pre K-8, reprinted on the Find Articles website, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3666/is_200402/ai_n9361313.