March Madness: Upper Elementary Edition

I am a big fan of March Madness, but not for the reasons you may think! I am not a huge basketball fan and probably can count on one hand how many basketball games I watch in one year. What I do love though is competition! If you tell me that you are making something a competition, I am there for it. So many of our students love competition too! So, about 4 years ago, I started having March Madness competitions in my classroom every year and they have been a huge hit! Today, I am going to talk about my two favorite March Madness classroom competitions.

Idea #1: i-Ready March Madness

4 years ago, I taught at a school that used i-Ready and I was looking for a way to motivate my students to not only complete their lessons, but do their best work and pass their lessons. This is when the i-Ready March Madness Competition was created. I created some brackets on the hallway wall outside of our classroom using scotch colored tape (see the picture below). Then, I laminated my student’s names and taped them onto the bracket to make it easy to move. Each week, students would compete against another student in the class to see who would move on to the next week. Every Wednesday, I would tell them how many points (each lesson passed was a point) each student had and they never let me forget to tell them! At the end of the week, the student with the most points would move onto the next part of the bracket. For the students that didn’t move on, they would still continue working towards passing lessons for a small prize each week. For example: 5 points may mean a piece of candy or class tickets. For the students that did move on, there would be a prize too and the prize got bigger each week! In the picture above, you can see that the final four each received a donut and medal. Some weeks, there was a tie between two students and I would then give them the weekend to complete more lessons and we would check back on Monday for the winner. To say this was a hit with my students, is an understatement. I had a TON more students actually passing lessons and doing their best work while on i-Ready!

An important part of this competition is getting the families at home on board too, since a lot of the lessons were done at home. I would always start by having a big opening ceremony to explain the competition to my students and then send home a letter to their families at home. After just one time of doing this competition, I knew this would be something that I would do every year with my students! Click the image below to grab the FREE letter to send home to parents and guardians.

Idea #2: Reading March Madness

2 years ago, I moved to a different school that did not use i-Ready. I was so disappointed that I would not be able to do i-Ready March Madness. So, I started to think about what I could do instead. This particular year, I had a group of students that did not like to read at home. It was always “homework” that they read for at least 20 minutes at home every day, but so many of my students were not doing it. With the research behind how important it is that a child is reading every day, I knew I needed to do something to encourage my students to start reading at home daily. THis particular year, I was only teaching Literacy too. Keeping both of those in mind, I decided to create Reading March Madness. It was created to encourage my students to read more at home, but I knew I needed something to hold them accountable for their reading too. So, I decided to require them to write a summary to go along with their reading.

Just like i-Ready March Madness, I started by creating brackets in the hallway out of scotch colored tape and put up laminated names of each student. We had a BIG opening ceremony where I drew names out of a bucket (I didn’t have a hat at school) to see who would start off competing against one another. I highly recommend doing that because my kiddos loved it and it got them excited before we even started! Every Wednesday, I would tell the students how many points they had at that point in the week (every summary was a point) and then on Friday, I would count up all the points. When they came to school on Monday, the students that had the most points would be moved to the next part of the bracket. It was so fun to see them rush over to it each Monday and I loved hearing comments from students from other classes when they walked by! Like i-Ready March Madness, the students who were eliminated each week still continued to read and write summaries for a small prize each week. The students who moved on would receive a prize too that got bigger each week!

Are you interested in trying Reading March Madness with your students? Click the picture below to grab the Reading March Madness Starter Pack that gives you everything you need to get this March Madness competition up and running in your classroom. This starter pack now includes a digital competition that can be used if you are teaching virtually.