0 March Madness Math Project and Prepping For Spring!

Our March Madness Tournament Project is in FULL SWING! Click HERE or below to check it out!

 

Since the majority of this project can be completed after the tournament is over, we are having fun right now just watching the games at home and updating our brackets. I love hearing that my kids are at home spending time with their families by watching the games and talking about math! :)

The great thing about this project is that it can be implemented at any time of the year. I had a teacher share with me that she used last year's brackets and did this project back in January!! It can also be an independent home project or an at school whole class project. I plan to use it both ways since our Spring Break starts next week. So, I plan to slowly teach my kids each part of the project in order for them to complete some of it at home on their own.

I always start by teaching my students how to fill out the brackets. Some students have parents at home that are into sports and shared with them their own brackets, but this year my kids needed a bit more help. It was super easy and because 2 of our state's teams are in the tournament this year, I had their FULL attention!

Once the students understood how the bracket system worked, the next morning I gave them time after their morning work to update their brackets. Many of my students don't have access to televisions or computers at home, and despite the fact that we only have 2 laptops in our classroom this took my students about 3 minutes.

On Monday we will do a little cross-curricular work and tie in social studies in order to see which states have teams playing in the tournament this year. This will then kick off our study of probability, which my high kids have been begging me for this year!

Click HERE to check out the March Madness Activities above!

On another note, since we only have 3 days of school this week, I prepped these super cute writing projects from my Spring Persuasive Writing Pack.

This pack is full of great stuff to get us through those crazy spring months! There are prompts about spring break, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, and I've even gotten a head start and started thinking about Mother's Day, too!

You can check my Spring Persuasive Writing Pack HERE!

Being that I am in the middle of packing boxes, hiring painters and plumbers in preparation for our big move, I will thank myself in May when I drop dead of exhaustion! ;)

What are you up to blogger friends!?

Detail: March Madness Math Project and Prepping For Spring!

0 Factors and Multiples

Happy Monday blog world! How many of you are knee deep in fractions right now?!

Last week we started talking about factors, multiples, simplifying, equivalents, and more. Before I knew it, my student's eyes looked a bit cross. Many of them were tripping up on the difference between a factor and a multiple. No matter how many times we repeated it, wrote it, acted it out, they couldn't quite remember.

Then, as if the clouds parted and the angels started singing, I remembered this fantastic anchor chart that I saw a while back about a factor ninja??? and multiple monster??? You can see the originals HERE.

...and VOILA!!!

With a little Miss Nannini touch, I had my kids chopping up products all afternoon (with ninja sound effects of course!)

They absolutely loved these ideas to help them remember the difference!

Here they are on our math focus wall (or door!):

As a quick formative assessment, we threw out our typical paper/pencil test and created artistic posters instead. Sometimes you need to create alternative assessments, especially when your kids have spring fever, and it is conference week.

I had each student take their student number (unless you were #1 and #2...they were assigned different numbers) and list out all of the multiples and factors of their student number. They also had to give me their own definition of factors and multiples. I didn't give them any other guidelines besides the fact that they could be as creative as they would like when decorating them.

 -Has my obsession with doodle borders gone to my kids now too!??!

We finished these in 1 math block and it was a super easy, fun way of giving me a quick check of where they're currently at with these concepts. I know it's nothing profound, but I like an honest quick assessment that doesn't always require a dog and pony show! ;)

Here are a few more examples of the finished assessments:

How cute is this student's poster?! He asked if he could "theme" his poster, with Despicable Me. Of course I couldn't say no. I have such a creative group this year, so any chance for art is a must!

*I wanted to update those of you that purchased my March Madness Math Project. I updated all of the rounds to reflect the new tournament "lingo" this year. I also updated all of the websites to include the current brackets! Go re-download your updated version for free, or if you don't have it go check it out HERE! It starts this WEEK!!!!

Have a great week everyone!

Detail: Factors and Multiples

0 March Madness! In September?!

That's right everyone! March Madness!! I swear I am not rushing the year ;) I also SWEAR that I don't have my lessons plans completed through March (I WISH!!) Trust me though, March will be here before we know it!!!!

I have found that usually at about the February/March time of the school year, my kids get a little squirrelly. Living in Michigan means that during these months we are inside for recess, every day is gloomy and dreary, and we are ALWAYS in need of something to SPARK some enthusiasm!! (Especially for my sweet boys that start getting SO restless this time of year, that you would think with all of the pencil tapping on desks, we had a 15 piece drum band in our classroom!)

Alas...a Common Core Math aligned, March Madness Basketball Tournament Project!!!

My kids LOVE this!! It's hilarious because even my super girlie girls can be heard talking rebounds, assists, points, and free throws this time of year! 

This March Madness Basketball Tournament Project is 27+ pages long, and includes tables to track certain teams' wins, losses, statistics and more. Students will track the tournament with a real March Madness Tournament bracket!! (SO MUCH FUN!) They will gather data throughout the tournament, and turn this data into fractions, decimals, and percents. They will also write algebraic expressions and equations, find the mean, median, mode and range, write line plots, write to explain patterns in their data, add fractions, pick a favorite player to follow and MUCH, MUCH MORE!!!!! PFEW!!!

Here is a snapshot of ALL the pages included in the project, click HERE or the pictures below to check them out: 

Here is a close up of a few of pages: 

This is a perfect project for this time of year, to transfer your students' learning of all those math concepts, to one super fun project!! I hope your kids enjoy it as much as mine do!!! Click HERE or the picture above to check it out! 

*PLEASE NOTE: This project does not necessarily need to be done during the actual March Madness Tournament. Due to the nature of the questions, the majority of the project can be done after the tournament has ended. I have even used this as an enrichment project and/or a data project in the month of January, and used the past year's data to complete the project. 

*Also, since students may not have televisions or internet access at home, you can take about 3 minutes during the day (in the morning, after lunch, at the end of the day, etc.) to pull up the tournament wins and losses and allow your students that time to update their brackets. 

*It is not year specific, and if the need arises, I will update it from year to year. So, once you purchase it one time, you have it to use for years to come. I have already made the necessary changes for the 2013 tournament that include the changes of the round names. 

Detail: March Madness! In September?!