Tournament of Books
A few years ago, I absolutely fell in love with The Brown Bag Teacher’s March Madness Tournament of Books. I thought it was the best idea ever, and I really wanted to try it! Unfortunately, it was one of those ideas that I loved, pinned, and then completely forgot about. This year I have a group of voracious readers who happen to love sports, so I know they would LOVE a Tournament of Books. I’ve planned ahead this year, so I wouldn’t miss out on the fun! I’m all for simplifying, so our Tournament of Books will be held digitally, which should make the voting process easy for students and me.
I am fortunate to have a Chromebook for every student, and I regularly use Google Classroom, so I’m going to have students make all of their nominations and vote digitally, which will save me a TON of time. I written directions and have included links to help you use this Tournament of Books digitally. If you need help learning how to add assignments and navigate Google Classroom, be sure to check out this blog post. I started with allowing students to nominate their favorite book to our Sweet 16 bracket. I didn’t set any requirements in students’ book nominations. They could nominate a book they read independently, that was read to them, that they read in reading groups, or a book from literature circles. I added the nomination form as an assignment in Google Classroom.
Students were able to open the form and type in the book of their choice, and then submit the form. It took less that 5 minutes to complete this step!
Here’s the exciting part….you don’t have to count or tally votes!! After everyone has voted, open the form in your Google Drive and click responses. Since the process is so easy, I’m going to have all of our third, fourth, and fifth graders participate. If anyone else wants to vote, that’s fine, but those are the grade levels where I’ll really push the tournament.
If students use the same links, even in different classes, the responses are consolidated in the same form, so I don’t have to look at individual class reports. After clicking responses, select the green button to view responses in Sheets.
Once you open the sheet, you can sort the responses by ABC order. This will allow you to quickly see how many times different books have been nominated.
I quickly looked through the list and determined which 16 books were the most frequently nominated. (The screen shots were taken before everyone had the chance to vote.) I saved the cover pages of the top 16 books as a JPEG and printed the covers. Since that did use more colored ink than I like to use. I was sure to laminate the cover pages, so I can reuse them next year if the same books are nominated. I used the pictures and printouts to display our bracket in the hallway
Each week in March students will vote on the books competing against each other. I know there’s not a great way to enforce this, but I strongly encourage students to only vote on books they have actually read. This gets a lot of buzz going about the nominated books, and students start racing to read the book they haven’t yet read. We haven’t had our first vote, but I’ve already made forms that can be used to vote in each round of the tournament. One I have the top 16 books, I’ll fill in the titles in place of “book 1”, “book 2” etc. I’ve created a different form for each round of voting.
Once students vote on a form, you can open the form and the total votes for each book are already calculated! That is such an incredible time saver!! {Have I mentioned I love Google Forms?} Each week students will vote until they have chosen the top book of the year. I’m going to have my students predict which book they think will win, but I think there will be some surprises along the way. You can download the printables and links I used for this Tournament of Books here!
Let me know if you have any questions or if you have any other creative/easy ways to conduct a Tournament of Books!
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