Do you want to do something awesome for literacy week? Check this out! Your students are going to love it and everyone is going to be pumped for your school wide book tournament. 

Hi! I’m Jeanette, a second grade teacher! I am so excited to be guest blogging to share with you all about our School Wide Tournament of Books for K-5. Our school has done this the last three years during literacy week and it quickly became an all school favorite.


This is also the time we put up our school-wide bulletin board to promote the Tournament with students. We put it on a wall near the office in the middle of the school so it can be viewed by everyone. The bulletin board looks like a March Madness bracket and displays each set of competing books with a copy of their book cover. The conversations we hear kids having around this bulletin board discussing their predictions is one of the best parts of the Tournament of Books!
Here's the bulletin board ready to go. We have used the same materials for all 3 years, which makes it really easy. All we have to do is copy the book covers.

The Tournament of Books continues through March with the champion book revealed right before Spring Break. Since teachers have less books to read and don’t necessarily need to reread all the remaining books (although most of the time the kids beg for it), there is a shorter turnaround between the remaining rounds. About 4 days to vote on the Elite 8, 3 days for the Final 4, 2 days to narrow it down to the 2 books in the Championship Round and then 1 day to vote on the Champion book. It wouldn’t have to be exactly that time frame but that has worked for us trying to finish before Spring Break. Before each new round teachers are given a new ballot with new match-ups. The books moving on in the Tournament of Books remain on the special cart in the library but I update the competing matchups and remove the titles that didn’t win. If teachers don’t want to reread all the remaining books or just don’t have time, I send out a document with pictures of the competing titles for teachers to show kids before voting to make it easier to remember each book. This is the process we have used the past 3 years but next year we are planning to try voting through Google forms to streamline the voting and reduce the number of paper ballots to keep track of.

I also just came across this website, where you can create your own bracket. All you have to do is type in the book titles. That would be a lot easier than putting in the book images like we did. Although ours is geared to K-5, so the images were great for our younger students. Check out the website!
Here are pictures of our school-wide bracket bulletin board throughout the process.
Thank you so much for stopping by. Have you done this in your school or with your class? I'd love to hear, please share in the comments below.
~Jeanette
Great pictures! We've tried this for March Madness and also for friendly competition between classes who read the most. This would be fun to incorporate mini-challenges throughout the school year - even Back to School! Thanks for sharing, Jen
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh! I love this idea! This would be perfect with March Madness which is also around the same time as Reading Week. I'm going to definitely suggest this at my school. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteJordan
Team J's Second Grade Fun
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ReplyDeleteWhat an awesome idea! We are getting ready to do our own tourney in March, thanks to your post!
ReplyDeleteLove your creative ideas <3
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