With a lot of help from Miss Tandy next door, we had tons of fun with March Madness in both social studies and math! Below are just some of the activities that we did!
Our first lesson had us mapping the teams in the tourney. All 68 teams needed to be located and we listed them on the map of the United States. Kids then chose the school color of the team they picked to go the furthest in the tournament to color each state.
Then it was math time. We calculated the probability of a team from each state winning the tournament. We calculated what percentage of states didn't have a team represented in the tournament. We also calculated the percent chance of winning as a team advanced through each round.
Then, we took the Sweet 16 teams and used their wins and losses records to calculate their overall winning percentages and their conference winning percentages. Then, each child was assigned a team and we went to the courtyard to arrange ourselves in order from best to worst winning percentages. Kentucky had it easy, 100%!
Last, but not least, we took it to the court and calculated our free throw percentages! Students rolled dice to find out how many free throws they would be attempting. They took their shots and made a fraction using the shots they made over the total shots taken. They then converted that fraction into a percentage!
Having the kids dive into March Madness helped them apply a lot of our difficult math topics to something relevant!!