March Madness, Collaboration #Crush

We are totally ready for March (this year)!! Last year I saw this awesome idea and posted about it because it didn't happen... not even a little bit.  But this year our specialist team took a collaboration day.  Our team has very little common prep and much of the time we can meet it is in 1/2 hour blocks and it's hard to be productive.  We requested some time together to talk about many topics.  It was a very productive day.  We accomplished our checklist and mARTch Madness is up and ready for our students to participate in!

So here are the 'Art brackets'.  As you can see, I concentrated on art from around the world.  It's a set of prints that I thought would be fun for our students to look at.  I thought about more traditional art but decided to do art from around the world instead.  Each (digital) week (6-day rotation) the kids will do a vote. 

As you can see, I created a google doc that I will have the kids vote each day on.  The older groups will be able to vote individually (using a QR code to direct them to the Google Form).  The younger groups will vote as a class. 

We will take the data and move the brackets forward, make a new google doc and continue the votes.  At the end of the month we will have live voting on our Morning Show.

Our media specialist, Meagan Harapat @HarapatMeagan, will be voting on books that all students could celebrate.  This was hard to choose when teaching K-5 but I think she did a great job.  I have a couple to add to my read list before voting for sure.

The music department lead (at this time), Val Krych, chose these songs for their brackets.  These are going to be so fun for the kids.  She will be covering a variety of content in her listening sessions for the songs that are chosen. 

As our amazing PE Departments often does, they came up with these fitness categories.  This is going to be the hardest for me to vote for. I love all of these fitness activities.  I'm so lucky to have Matt Johnson @Advocate4Physed and Theresa Brummer @BrummerTheresa on my team.  They are tremendous 'doers'.

We think that March Madness is important for lots of reasons.  We are involving the whole school... getting them excited about the specialist areas, and allowing them to have conversations about these classes outside of the half hour to hour they are in class.  These brackets are very prominent in the cafeteria area and kids are already talking about it.  We are a team, but it's hard to identify that with our group because we all teach different subjects.  It's important to have 'people' in the school that you work with, and we are an unlikely match up (however, many times we are lumped together as the 'others' for PD).  We could continue to look at our differences, or we can unite, support each other, work together and show that we truly are a TEAM.  I feel that we have done all that we could this year to join together on many endeavors and that is making for a wonderful year.

So no... I don't have a little picture for the #Crush this post... but this team is truly my collaboration #Crush!