A great functional activity for your family or classroom!

So if I had continued teaching I would have added this as one of our March activities, I had some boys in my class who by now would be ready and very excited for an opportunity like this.  We would have a March Madness Bracket Competition! With a delicious prize of course!  I thought it would be a great opportunity to create a bracket, then have to find out the scores of teh games from the previous day and look at the numbers and figure out which one was bigger (very good skill) and then chart or mark it on your bracket.  Then by the end they would be required to add up different point values folr each section of the bracket and see who won.  There are many ways this can be modified for students.  Espn has a great website for creating and printing your bracket electronically here.  You could also do the competition using pictures of the mascots and maybe make it a cut and paste activity. Or even by colors of the team....this was actually created for wives....come on guys give us more credit.  I beat my husband every year!!  You could also have a braket where they just circle who would win.  Look how many different modifications there already are that you don't even need to create!  You can also check out this fabulous HUGE bracket on one of my favorite blogs!  I love it!  Maybe you could throw one of these in your classroom and do it as a class!

As the teacher or parent you could have a list of the scores and have them circle the bigger number and mark it on their chart.  (Since sometimes online and in the news papers they bold the bigger number and that would be too easy now wouldn't it!)  Or you could have the students who are more literate and or computer savvy look them up on their own by headlines or on different sports sites.  Oh man I wish I wish still teaching so we could have our own March Madness....no worries.  I have plenty of years to do this with my own little family!!!  So get to it!!!