By Chad Koenen

Publisher

The month of March has long been associated with spring, basketball, upsets, and of course countless brackets for college basketball. 

However, Henning School elementary teacher Rachel Greenwaldt is hoping to put a new spin on the craze about brackets and competition through a new March Madness Tournament of Books challenge at Henning School. The new elementary-wide event kicked off on March 2 to coincide
with Dr. Seuss Day at the school with the hopes of putting a fun and new spin on promoting reading within the school district.

The tournament showcases a “Sweet 16” bracket of picture books that will be competing for the championship, which will be announced on Friday, March 27. Greenwaldt has been busy planning the new reading competition for quite some time and got the idea from a student teaching experience she had a few years ago. 

“The first inspiration for this event came from my student teaching experience. They put on a similar book tournament for ‘I Love to Read Month’ in February,” said Greenwaldt. “Since our school year has a lot of excitement with homecoming, holiday classroom parties, concerts, snow week and field trips through the end of February, I wanted to bring something in for spring. I decided to draw from the anticipation of basketball playoffs and planned it for March.”

Greenwaldt said her goal was to create a fun activity that could be shared across all of the elementary grade levels to foster enjoyment in reading. In order to get started, she asked each teacher from preschool through fifth grade to nominate their top two favorite read-aloud books. From that pool of books the elementary teacher narrowed down the list to a group of 16 books that would go head-to-head each week until a champion was crowned. 

“Each week in March features four book face-offs leading up to the championship results on Friday, March 27,” said Greenwaldt. “All classrooms were given the opportunity to fill out brackets before the tournament started, similar to the college basketball March Madness. Students made comments about the books they picked every time they passed the wall display. While students participate in daily reading face-offs, they are also experiencing an elimination bracket and the power of voting first-hand.”

Each day throughout the month of March, each classroom at the elementary level lwill isten to the same daily face-off books and vote on which book should win the contest. Since many of the high school students work in elementary classrooms throughout the day, Greenwaldt said the contest has spread into the high school level as well as they share their thoughts on the books being read as part of the contest. 

In order to make the contest more interactive, a large 16-book bracket featuring each of the books in the contest is on display in the elementary wing of the school. The bracket has led to quite a bit of discussion between students about which book will ultimately be crowned as champion and the upsets that have taken place along the way.

“We have completed the first half of our Sweet 16 face-offs and the students are fully invested! Every single classroom is listening to the same daily face-off, so it’s fun to see upper elementary students interacting with their younger peers about the featured books. The best part is that the students vote on which book wins and every individual student vote counts. I take the totals from each classroom ballot at the end of the day and reveal the advancing book,” she said. “I also display the voting results above like a final score, so students are able to see how many others voted like them. There are lots of differing opinions about which book will make it all the way. My biggest hope is that this gives students (and teachers) a little something extra to look forward to each day as we near the end of our school year.”