March Book Madness

This year I was excited to try something that I'd seen online several times, March Book Madness. I went with the list provided on this website because the resources were premade and ready to go.

I made these fliers and invited teachers to come in. I had several Freshman Academic Enrichment classes sign up and one of my English teachers. I wasn't able to drag this out and have voting going on for a long time so for each class we started with a Google Form with the pairs then I edited another Google Form after each vote until we got to the Finals. It was interesting to see the variations among the classes. I had 3 copies of each book available and by the end of the class meetings, they were gone. Score!
We watched book trailers before each pairing and the teacher posted the Google Forms in their Google Classrooms for easy access. The Youtube playlist is here. As a bonus, every student submission entered their name into a drawing for a book prize pack. The winning student's teacher also won a prize. The student and teacher received a set of the Blacktop books. The student prize basket also included some candy and Gatorade. As each teacher brought in their class, I had them fill out a bracket predicting which books would win the face-offs. Mrs. Rains and Ms. Moye tied for the best bracket with 10 correct predictions. They each won a book for their classroom including, After the Shot Drops, an ARC I won on a Twitter giveaway.

The winning student was Christian and his teacher, Ms. Moye. Overall, Scythe by Neal Shusterman was the winning book. The awesome trailer didn't hurt. I really enjoyed this program and so did the students. Next year I may choose my own Sweet 16 based on our state award list or popular titles in our library.