Seven Baseball-Themed Classroom Activities for the World Series

The World Series kicked off last night in San Francisco, and during the next week, it might be on the your mind or the mind of some of your students. We know here at Edutopia, the series between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers has certainly made its way into some of our watercooler conversations.

Fortunately for teachers, baseball is a great way to get some students excited about learning, and with any sport with tons of statistics, it's a wonderful subject to work into math lessons. Really, there are great opportunities to use baseball as a teaching tool in all subjects, and for some students, baseball metaphors sometimes do a great job of drawing them in.

So in honor of the 108^th World Series, which runs until November 1, Edutopia has put together a collection of lesson plans and resources to help teachers work America's Favorite Pastime into the classroom. And yeah, we might be a little biased up here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Go Giants!

• Classroom Exercises from the National Baseball Hall of Fame: Baseball-themed lesson plans and resources in science, math, social studies, and the arts from the Baseball Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
• Baseball Stat Lesson Plans for Grades 6-8: Have your students calculate baseball statistics using algebraic formulas with this resource from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The Baseball Almanac also provides a great statistic-calculation resource.
• Pitch Perfect from The Kennedy Center: Set the perfect lineup of instruments in this interactive tool, which provides historical and musical context and gives students a chance to learn about pitch and tone. Another great Kennedy Center resource All Around The Baseball Field lets students "construct a mock baseball field and from there explore the sport of baseball through art, movement and sound."
• Negro League eMuseum: This resource, from the Kansas State College of Education, provides historical context and easy-to-use lesson plans for teachers. The Library of Congress also has some great lesson plans for grades 9-12 covering Jackie Robinson, the first black Major League Baseball player.
• Baseball Geometry from PBS: Students learn about "historical and modern materials and construction of baseballs," and they can calculate volume and surface area of a sphere.
• 5 Great Ideas for Teaching With Baseball: This list from Promethean Planet provides great ideas for baseball-themed lessons in history, math, science, language arts and classroom management. (The list is from 2010; the last time the Giants were in the playoffs.)
• Baseball Activities and Lesson Plans from TeachersCorner.net: An exhaustive curation of baseball resources from around the Web, including worksheets, crossword puzzles and word-search activities.

These were just a few of the baseball classroom resources. There really are a number of baseball-themed classroom resources out there. Did we miss anything? What are some of the baseball-themed classroom tools you use?