Sports Inspired Library Lessons

Let's face it, sometimes school isn't fun. I feel like that I have a little more flexibility than the classroom teachers so I try to be inspired by what's happening in the world. These are a few lessons I've taught recently that were inspired by sports events.

1. Super Bowl Media Literacy

I love the resources shared by Frank Baker on media literacy. Each year he shares links and lesson ideas for using Super Bowl commercials for media literacy and advertising analysis. Joyce Valenza also shared these great ideas. I put this handout on each table as the students came in for the lesson. First we talked about who watched and why, the number of Americans that watched (110 million), the top advertisers, cost of ads, and what types of ads they might see. Then we watched and analyzed several new and old commercials. We ended the lesson with cookies because you can't watch TV without a snack, right?
This is the Youtube playlist I made for the lesson.
This was one of the favorites.

2. Winter Olympics

I shared this article from the NY Times with lots of Olympic related articles and lesson ideas. Some of my Freshman Academy teachers were interested so I put together a lesson using the Olympics to practice writing. They shared the slides on Google Classroom and we guided the students through the different activities.

This was a fun way to practice writing and pull in current events.

3. March Book Madness
I'm planning to try the March Book Madness program this year. Luckily there are some hard working teachers that have been putting this together each year for a while so I decided to use their suggested titles instead of starting from scratch.

I'll be sharing this with the teachers in the hopes that they'll share the titles and allow students to vote for their favorites. I think some of my Freshman Academy teachers will bring their classes in to go through the trailers/booktalks with me for voting. As an incentive, I'm putting together a basketball-themed gift basket with the Blacktop series, sports drinks, and candy. For every vote, the student will be entered into the drawing and the winning student's teacher will also get a set of the Blacktop book series for their classroom library. I found these in paperback at Reading Warehouse for a good price.
Feel free to use the slides I put together. I'll be using Google Forms for voting.

<I would love to hear how you tie in sports or other news into your lessons to make them more engaging and fun.