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March Madness Bulletin Board

Are your kids as excited for March Madness as mine are? Not all of them, obviously, but I have a lot of boys who have very little interest in math who are currently very interested in basketball and all the fun that March Madness brings. In order to capture their attention a little, I put together this March Madness bulletin board and we played an activity in class to go with it as a quiz review.

First, let me tell you a little bit about this board. First, I printed out and cut the title for the board. Then I made 100 basketballs with polynomial problems on them for my students to solve. I meant to print it on orange paper, but I forgot to tell my service worker to do that, sooo maybe next time! (oops.) Anyways, I printed out and cut the basketballs also, threw up a portable basketball hoop and used a few sheets of paper to make a scoreboard. 

So here's how the "interactive" part of the bulletin board came about. My students are always trying to shoot their paper wads into my trashcan, and so I figured, why not let them shoot it into this hoop. I gave both teams 60 seconds to use whatever they had to make a basketball to use for the game. I wrote their team names on our make shift score board and I readied the basketball math problems. Now, I have very different classroom dynamics, so I did this a little different in each of my classes but here are the two main ways I played the game
  • Hand each student out a card. Let them solve it on their own. Go around the room and have students share their polynomial and answer. If they got it right, their team gets two points. If they got it wrong, one of their teammates had a chance to get a "rebound" and answer it for them. This gave the team 1 point. If both of those students missed, the other team got a "breakaway" and had a chance to steal the two points. I went back and forth between the two teams allowing them to answer. This was great for my honors students who knew the content and aren't shy to answer problems aloud in class. It was a tight game. 
  • For my non-honors class, I had them go one at a time trying to solve the same question on the board. The student that got it correct first, got two points for their team. If they got it wrong, the other team player at the board got a change to get the rebound and breakaway for the two points. They then wrote the correct answer and their name on the basketball to hang on the board. 
With both of these, I had multiple polynomial problems solved with correct answers and students names (hello, displaying student work) to display on my bulletin board AND we got to review for our quiz while doing it. Can you say double win?


If you want to use this bulletin board in your classroom, check it out here. 

GBO,
Hilary 

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