Hoop Genius

We are basketball-ing it up in the combo! We were so excited to get tickets to the NAIA tournament.  Thank you to Tire-Rama and Scheels for the opportunity.  We saw a game between Menlo and LSU.  We had terrific seats right behind the Menlo team.  The students cheered their hearts out!  I really believe we gave Menlo an extra spirit boost to win the game.  The team often looked back at us with huge smiles and a couple players even came up to the kids after the game to give high fives! So much FUN!!!

Also along with the tournament, we had a visit from the members of the Blue Raiders. The ladies did an assembly on character.  The Blue Raiders came to our school last year, it was great to see the team again!



I never pass up a good theme opportunity.  Since we were talking so much basketball, we did some academic tasks relating to the sport.  First, we read a great book called Hoop Genius about how basketball was invented.  Did you know the sport was created by a teacher! From the book we worked on vocabulary and using text evidence to draw conclusions.  We also practiced fluency by reading a play based on the book.

Additionally, students read nonfiction articles about basketball legends.  We played a game called grammar-ball to practice identifying parts of speech.  Further, we did some writing.  We made a large poster thanking Tire-Rama for our NAIA tickets.

One of the favorite activities was a STEM challenge.  The third graders were given the challenge to create a tower that could hold a basketball for 20 seconds.  The groups could only use masking tape and newspaper to create the tower.  Groups were challenged to make the tower as tall as possible.