Super Bowl Fun to Drive Your Students Straight to the Goal Line

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The big game is coming this weekend!  Are you a football fan? Even if you're not, the Super Bowl has been getting lots of attention in the media, so your students are likely caught up in the football frenzy!  And, if you're like us, anything that captures our students' attention means we are searching for opportunities to channel that interest into learning.

There are many ways to tie football and the Super Bowl into your curriculum—and in any subject area you teach.

🏈  Social Studies - mapping

Here are just a few fun mapping ideas for your class:

• map the location of the teams
• use scale of miles to determine the distance between Philadelphia and Boston
• use scale of miles to find out how far each team will travel to the game in Minneapolis
• find the latitude and longitude of the home cities and the game site
• map your route to get to the Super Bowl
• use Google Earth to  explore Philadelphia, Boston, and Minneapolis; can you find the stadium?

🏈  Science 

Football is a perfect match for science!  You can have students connect concepts like force, gravity, motion, and more!  There are many STEM projects related to football, too.  Here are a few links to get you started.

Wonderopolis - What's so super about Super Bowl Sunday?

Chevron Stem Zone

Science Buddies Super Bowl Science

🏈  Math

The Super Bowl has a host of math connections! 

• measurement - just how far is 100 yards?
• more measuring - how far can you kick (or throw) a ball?
• cost to attend - how much would it cost for tickets, travel, hotel
• elapsed time - how long would you travel to get to Minneapolis?
• statistics - compare stats of the two teams of two players
• graphing - research which teams have won multiple Super Bowls, or graph player stats; graph results (try this online graphing site:  NCES Kid Zone:  Create a Graph
• place value - use yardage, scores, or the cost to run an ad during the Super Bowl; break these numbers down by place value

🏈  English Language Arts

Where do we even start??  Well, the best two places are the teams themselves and the famous Super Bowl ads!  

• research your favorite team or player
•  create a Google Slide with info and join these into one class slide show
•  work with a partner to create an infographic to share facts—try Easel.ly or Google Charts

• watch the Top 10 Super Bowl Plays and select two to compare and contrast
• view the best Super Bowl ads then write to tell which you think is best
• middle school teachers will love Frank Baker's MiddleWeb information on teaching media literacy with Super Bowl ads

🏈  Trivia Quiz

If you want to challenge your students, check out ThoughtCo's trivia quizzes.

🏈  Finally, if you'd like a SUPER resource with loads of fun cross-curricular activities, here is one we created! 

✓ TWO Close Reading Passages, to differentiate instruction for 2nd-3rd and 4th-5th reading levels
✓ Close Reading answer keys 
✓ Game Match Up - Research to compare the big teams 
✓ Venn Diagram – compare and contrast the info you found for the Match Up activity
✓ Football Spelling List (five lists on a page to save paper) 
✓ Football ABC Order Activity and answer key
✓ Math Task Cards – 8 Cards Each for Addition, Subtraction, and Multiplication
✓ Task Card answer keys and student answer page 
✓ Football Writing Prompt with Graphic Organizer 
✓ Writing Paper for final copy 
✓ Super Football Facts and Predictions - another opportunity to research these two great teams and to predict the champion
✓ Football Helmet and Jersey Design Pages

BOO-tiful October Craft and Free Color-by-Code Resource

Two little teacher-authors sitting on the gate,

The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late!"

The second one said, "There're witches in the air."

The first one said, "Witches & Frankenstein make quite a pair!"

The second one said, "Bats + pumpkins + candy corn..."

The first one said, "And a new resource is born!"

Whoooo went the wind and clouds covered the sun,

And the two teacher-authors posted some 

COLOR BY CODE fun!!

Flubber October Freebie 

We hope your October has come in like a.....oh, wait, that's March. Well, regardless—we hope your October is off to a BOOming start!

We've made a fall Parts of Speech freebie for you - it's a fun way to practice identifying nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  Just click on the link in the picture caption and it's yours.

Color by Code: Multiplication

If you like this color-by-number activity, be sure to look for our newest math resource for multiplication!  This product offers four resources to give your students practice with multiplication facts and relating multiplication to division!


Here's a little cutie to share our wishes for a BOO-tiful October—isn't it precious? You can make your own, too!  If you Google "Floating Ghost" or "Cheesecloth Ghost," you'll get a bunch of different methods and even a few videos to help you see the steps, but it's not hard.  You need just a few special items; the rest of the supplies are probably items you have at home:

• cheesecloth (easy to find in grocery or hardware stores)
• Elmer's glue, liquid starch, cornstarch, or spray starch
• water
• mixing bowl or small bucket for glue/starch + water
• pipe cleaners, wire hanger, or florist/craft wire to make outstretched arms
• a tall glass, cups, paper towel tube, or even a water bottle to give your ghost some height
• styrofoam ball, a ball of foil, small pumpkin, or a balloon for the rounded head
• a trash bag, plastic tablecloth, or waxed paper to protect your table 
• googly eyes, black construction paper or felt for eyes and/or mouth

From what I've read, it looks like if you use glue, you'll need 2 parts glue to 1 part water.  If you use liquid starch, you need 3 parts liquid starch to one part water.  If you use cornstarch, you will need to 3 cups of water and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch, which you boil to get a gravy-like consistency. (For us, it's just easier to use purchased glue or liquid starch, but I'm intrigued by the idea of creating my own binding material using something cheap like cornstarch!)

We've done this with students for a fun fall activity - and while it's a bit of a mess, we channeled our inner Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus and went with it - embracing the idea that learning is messy!  Plus, the squadron of ghosts drying around the room was just about the cutest Halloween decorating our classrooms have ever seen!

It would be fun to have students test out the glue method vs. starch method to see which actually works better!  If you try this, please be sure to leave us a comment below - or search for us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook to tell us how it went!

Pump(kin)ed for a Fun Fall!

Are you pumped for fall?  We LOVE fall - with its crisp mornings, the way a handful of leaves smell, pulling out jackets and boots, nights around the fire pit, and the way our students have settled into the routine of school....and, all things PUMPKIN - pumpkin rolls, pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin carving, pumpkin activities!

Here are three ideas and/or new resources that are perfect for engaging your learners in fun fall activities!

First up, how fun are these cool witchy finger pointers from Target!??  Any kid will be excited to find text evidence or even just follow along with these!  We used these during fluency reads to get kids to self-monitor slowing down for punctuation marks.  Our kids generally work with a partner for daily fluency reading, so it was easy for the reader to tap his or her finger on the punctuation mark while the partner give a soft witchy cackle!  By the end of the fluency session, we were all cracking up!

Next up is a year-long writing program with these monthly writing prompts!  You and I both know that scheduling time for writing is so important.  Writing is sadly often the "one thing" we tend to let go when things get busy.  Scheduling a short session for writing each day will help your young writers grow and develop and blossom!  Daily writing gives your kids a chance to build the stamina to write for longer periods of time, and it exposes them to many different types of prompts and types of writing.  

Daily writing is also is the premier way to assess whether they can apply the skills you are working on in English.  Want to know if they understand possessives?  Have them highlight places in their writing where they've used some.  Do you need to double check that they have indeed mastered subject and predicate?  Have students color code their writing to show subjects and predicates - or do this with verb tenses, or common and proper nouns...you'll find that daily writing lends itself to so many impromptu assessment opportunities.  And the best part (IMHO) is that these are authentic assessments rather than another worksheet.  After all, the bottom line is that we want them to be able to apply these skills in their writing, right?

This resource gives you daily writing from August (ok, admittedly it's well past that now, isn't it?) through May!  Be sure to look at the fun prompts for October!

The last resource to share today is our newly revised Halloween Costume Graphing Activity!  This is one of our favorite Halloween activities!  I'm not sure if your students are allowed to dress up, but ours do and they LOVE planning what to wear and seeing all of the different costumes.  Use this with your kids to practice  collecting data and making a graph.  Students also write their own story problems for others to solve based upon their graphs.  Your students will love this, too!  {We've updated it to provide detailed objectives, teacher and student directions, and we even included some options just in case your students don't come to school in costume.}

 

Please leave us a quick comment to let us know what your favorite FALL activity or resource is!!

Speaking of great resources - here is a little LINKY we're part of with some great teacher-authors having a SPOOKY SALE on Oct. 18th only!  Buzz on over to our friend Whitney's blog at First Grade Roundup to check out all of the bargains!



Happy fall, y'all!