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Seven Super Bowl Lesson Plans and Resources for the Classroom
January 29, 2013 | Matt Davis
Photo credit: iStockPhoto
This week, there might be a bit of Super Bowl energy and excitement running through your classroom, and there are a number of great ways to wrangle those murmurs into teachable moments.
This Sunday, February 3, the San Francisco 49ers will face the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl 47, and we here at Edutopia, like most football fans in Northern California, are excited to root for the hometown team. If you're looking for ways to incorporate the Super Bowl into your lessons, here are some links to resources around the Web. There's a little bit of every subject -- from media studies, to math, science, and the arts.
- Videos: The Science of NFL Football: These insightful and interesting video lessons feature several lessons for students, covering topics like geometry, nutrition, and Newton's Laws of Motion. At Lessonopoly, there's also a great list of accompanying lesson plans.
- Super Bowl Mania -- Creating Cross-Curricular Lessons That Score Big: Although this Scholastic article was produced for the Super Bowl in 2012, the ideas can be easily updated. Here, author Addie Albano provides ideas for math, language arts, science, and geography lessons framed around the Super Bowl.
- Learning about Music with Touchdown Songs: ARTSEDGE from The Kennedy Center produced this lesson plan for teaching about football using music. The lesson is designed for students 12-18 years old and covers fight songs, half-time sounds, and music from NFL Film.
- Super Bowl Math from Thinkfinity: Featuring several lesson plans for football-related math activities, this resource has ideas for every grade level. Students will be challenged to use their math skills to calculate odds and probability from football games, and there's also a lesson that looks at sports rankings. There's also a great list to outside links, as well, including "Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry," from ReadWriteThink.
- The Best Sites Where ELLs Can Learn About the Super Bowl from Larry Ferlazzo: Blogger and educator Larry Ferlazzo has been updating this list for the last few years, and there's plenty of valuable links throughout. Included in the list are links to podcasts, articles about Super Bowl history, and Super Bowl ads. There's something for every classroom.
- Top 12 Super Bowl Related Activities for the Classroom: This TeachHUB resource from last year provides 12 great ideas for incorporating the Super Bowl into classroom lessons. There's a wide range of ideas, from nutrition lessons to commercial analysis and writing projects.
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Comments (3)
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In the discussion of the
In the discussion of the superbowl in class, please also include the role of professional athletics in society. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that understanding of the details of athletics (eg points after touchdown, off-side penalties, linebackers, odds, details of players’ strengths and weaknesses …) is often more complex than politics, and that fans are usually capable of deep critical thinking involving many complex issues (pass or kick? punt on third down? kick the field goal or go for the touchdown?), but we are told that politics is too hard, and we should leave it to the experts.
He concludes that organized sports is a way of diverting our attention away from areas we could have an influence on to areas we can’t have an influence on.
I think the average citizen knows a lot more about the superbowl than the common core standards. To see what you know, please take our short quiz: http://www.progressive.org/test-your-public-ed-savvy
Thanks for including the Thinkfinity link!
Thanks so much. I added a link from the Thinkfinity page back to this post, so maybe we'll get some cross-site love going on :)
I did my own blog post with
I did my own blog post with ideas and links to resources for those ideas for using the Super Bowl as a teachable moment. The above ideas will be a great addition that I will add to it.
http://www.edutechintegration.net/2013/01/the-super-bowl-across-curricul...