Saturday, March 26, 2016

March 2016: March Author Madness!

I feel like January and February draaaaaaagggg on but March is really the worst culprit! Our school does not have a single day off in March :(

In some ways, this is great, as we can keep a momentum going. In other ways, it's terrible as there are no breaks to look forward to or rejuvenate with. It's also gray and gloomy and horrible outside.

To keep us excited, I have March Author Madness going:

A couple years ago, my husband taught me about March Madness. I wanted to get more kids into reading and thought this might be a fun way to reach more kids (especially kids that aren't usually readers). I was thinking about March Madness and decided to have March Author Madness! I have students vote for their favorite authors and then I make brackets and the authors go head to head to vote for the most favorite author of our school!

I use Google Forms and my class website to have them vote. To get ready for that, in January I made my class website a center. I taught students how to access it and then use it to have free choice between a few different educational websites (Encyclopedia Britannica database, Kid Info Bits database, Brainpop Jr., and Brainpop).

This made it easy to transition to voting every week, as they already knew how to get to the website. I showed them how to vote and they loved it! I also made a bulletin board to show the results. After only 3 years, I finally figured out how to make an actual bracket board! I also got smart and only let 16 authors through to the 2nd week (instead of 30 + like previous years).



After 5 weeks of voting, we have a winner!



Jeff Kinney wins again!

Coming in April, Bookmark Contest!