NCAA Tournament: No-Prep March Madness Reading and Math Activities

Final Four, Elite Eight, Sweet Sixteen. In March, conversation is peppered with all these terms as focus shifts to the NCAA basketball tournament. Use the excitement surrounding thispopular sporting event to engage students in activities that provide practice in revision, math, writing and reading comprehension. In addition, this resource contains word puzzles, which are great for strengthening student focus, spelling, and problem-solving abilities.

Activities in this packet include:

Reading Passage and Comprehension Questions: History of the tournament

Revision Passage and questions: The Gonzaga mascot

Basketball Idioms: Students use context clues to determine the meaning of common idioms derived from the game of basketball.

Creative Writing: Students will create an appropriate mascot for fictional Earhart University (named for Amelia Earhart), and will write a paragraph to describe the mascot and why they chose it. When done, they will illustrate their paragraph.

Two Word Searches with Hidden Messages

Word Criss-Cross Puzzle

Blank Tournament bracket: Students can research game outcomes, fill in the bracket and predict the outcome of future games

Math Madness: Gracie has spilled coffee all over the paper with the statistics from the Elite Eight games. Students must use math to help her reconstruct the chart.