March Book Madness

 We did a March Madness with book battles to coincide with the NCAA basketball tournament.  This Friday was our championship book battle, but the brackets began weeks ago with the Sweet 16.  The Sweet 16 match ups included: Green Eggs and Ham vs Cat in the Hat, Dog-Gone School vs What a Wonderful World (poetry bracket), Ron's Big Mission vs Salt in His Shoes (biography bracket), The Sun vs If You Decide to Go to the Moon (informational text), Fortunately vs Stick and Stone, Grandfather's Teeth vs Steal Back the Mona Lisa (mystery bracket), My Pet Dragon vs Me and My Dragon (fantasy bracket), and Cinderella vs Rumpelstiltskin (fairy tale bracket). We would read each book and then take a vote on the favorite.  From these match ups, we got an Elite 8.

With 8 books in the running we opened up voting to the entire first and second grade.  Again, each classroom would read both books and take votes.  With 120 kids now participating and voting, it took a little longer, but we soon had a Final Four.

When we reread the Final Four match ups we got together as a grade level.  When votes were tabulated, we were ready for the championship game on Friday.  It would be Dog-Gone School vs Rumpelstiltskin.  The entire first and second grade gathered together Friday morning.  Mrs. Niemeyer read Dog-Gone School and Mrs. Brinkman read Rumpelstiltskin.  

For the last vote, the children not only had to vote but they had to give a reason why the book should be our 2016 Book of the Year.  The winner was Dog-Gone School!  Pretty exciting!  We never would have guessed a book of poetry would be the winner!  Thanks for the great participation first and second grade!

Ms. Frey and I couldn't let the basketball theme go...so we kept playing right into math!  For math on Friday we had a shoot out and worked on our graphing skills.  First we let each class take a shot and we made a tally graph of hits and misses.  Ms. Frey's class won the class shoot out. 

 

Then we put the children in groups of three with a bucket and a ball.  Between the team, they had to shot, tally, graph, and interpret their results.  It looked like chaos but all the students were engaged in collecting, interpreting, and analyzing data.  We could definitely see evidence of learning when we combined our data on a large graph and had a rich mathematical discussion about the results.