Wednesday, April 12, 2017

March Book Madness


We did a March Madness with book battles to coincide with the NCAA basketball tournament.  Last Friday was our championship book battle, but the brackets began at the beginning of the month with the Sweet 16.  The Sweet 16 match ups included: The Important Book vs Picky Mrs. Pickle, Mother Bruce vs Bullfrog Pops , Those Shoes vs Thunder Boy , Mr. Peabody's Apples vs Peanut Butter and Cupcake, The Incredible Book Eating Boy vs The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, Little Red Writing vs The Plot Chickens, Nadia, The Girl Who Couldn't Sit Still vs The Darkest Dark, and Now and Ben vs I Dissent. We would read each book and then take a vote on the favorite.  From these match ups, we got an Elite 8.

March Book Madness on PhotoPeach


 With 8 books in the running we opened up voting to the all kindergarten through second grade students.  Again, each classroom would read both books and take votes.  With about 200 kids now participating and voting, it took a little longer, but we soon had a Final Four.  We announced the final four in an "Oscar like" assembly.  We even had the music. The book winners were sealed in an envelope and students were chosen to come up and make the important winning announcements.  You should have heard the students cheering wildly for their favorite books!  So awesome!

 

The final four included Nadia, The Girl Who Couldn't Sit Still vs I Dissent and Picky Mrs. Pickle vs Peanut Butter and a Cupcake.  In this third read of the books students were becoming very attached to their favorites.  Here is our table of the voting.  There were definitely two clear winners for "The Game."
We all gathered together for the reading of the final game! Mrs. Jensen read Peanut Butter and Cupcake.  Mrs. Wolverton read Nadia, The Girl Who Couldn't Sit Still . It was so exciting that via Twitter,  the one and only Nadia Comaneci, Olympic gold medalist, and the author of her book Karlin Gray tweeted our class!  How amazing is that?!  We even got so see a first draft of Ms. Gray's book.

   

After a huge vote and lots of adding, the results were in......drum roll.....the 2017 book of the year......


 
Thank you, Ms. Gray for not only writing our favorite book in the tournament but also for reaching out to our students.  We just love the #readinglikechampions! 

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