March Mammal Madness - What is this?!

2/15/2021

Do you have an animals or habitats unit coming up? How about something to do with adaptations? How about a writing unit with a focus on research or information texts?

March Mammal Madness 2021 is your answer!

This will be my third time participating in March Mammal Madness with my class. It is much like March Madness, but with animals! 4 divisions of 16 animals (plus a wild card) "battle" to see who wins! Don't worry, the battles aren't real (often the pairs would never encounter each other in real life) and don't always end in death either... sometimes an animal is just disinterested in a conflict, like in real life. Your job is to research each animal to the best of your ability so you can predict the winners and score the most points on the bracket.

Here is Everything You Need to Know:

Educators can get access to materials early: Click here to request information from them before it is live on their website. This will help you prepare materials for your class and plan activities and expectations. You will get the bracket as well as some lesson plans to help guide you. This request is available NOW until February 26th, 2021, when the official bracket is released.
Official Bracket drop: February 26, 2021
Battles begin: March 8, 2021
2021 Tournament Schedule: The battle timeline can be found here. When there is a winner, they will be posted on YouTube and a summary PDF will be available.

Ways I have used MMM in the past (with grades 3 and 4):

2018 - One class researches the whole bracket (in person, at school):

Printed A3 research papers for my small class of grade 3s. They worked in pairs on one animal at a time, fill in in my predetermined "important" things to know.
When they were done one, they chose another animal until all were researched, as a class.
I took a photo of each of the research papers and compiled them into a book on Book Creator. Then I pushed the ePub to each student so they could look at them on their iPad to make their choices for their bracket.
Brackets were posted in a central location (our door) and winners were announced as they came out. Excitement built each morning and students tallied their points.
Bonus: Another possibility here would be to brainstorm together what they think are the important things they should know/research about each animal. This brings agency and ownership to their research

2020 - One class researches the whole bracket, but 5 other classes also participated (home-based, online learning):

Each class had a set of Google Slides to complete about the animals (here is a link to a blank version).
I wrote the division, animal, rank, and student names on the slides before students had access.
Because online learning was not having 100% attendance at this time, students who finished quickly and were eager to research more were able to complete more slides that were not done yet
Each class' Google Slides were available for viewing/comparing as students made their final choices on their bracket
I updated a master Google Slide with winners, videos, and stories of the outcomes all linked to the MMM resources. These slides had many photos that were not checked for copyright (fair use for educational purposes), so I will not share them here, sorry.
It was a little hard to know their level of engagement/excitement post-research because they were at home, but some were definitely still checking out the winners
For grade 4 learners, we found it useful to change editing permissions every now and then for different reasons (a break in the school calendar, when editing was done, etc)

Instructions slide with tutorial videos

Student research slide

Timeline slide

Division 1 winners slide

2021 - Five classes will research the whole bracket (preparing for home-based, online learning):

Our plan for this year... we might be home-based, or we might be back in the classroom
Research to be done on Google Slides again (blank template here)
Possibly going to do one research bank for the whole grade level (5 classes), possibly do one/two classes together
Some animals will have two people researching because of numbers. English language learners or those with lower home learning engagement will be paired with someone with high engagement, so that animal will have two slides worth of information
Similar to last year, I will provide a master document with results and links to videos and summaries from the MMM resources they provide. Here is a blank version I plan to use (this requires you to be looking at the MMM website for updates on battle days).
Hopefully we will come back to the classroom and we can build the excitement in person. If not, I plan to use my morning meetings online to talk more about the animals, the battles, and the outcomes.

Title slide

Assign animals to students

Step by step instructions

Student research workspace (shared with classmates)

Other Ideas:

Have students create an informational text/book about each animal using Pages, Book Creator, Docs, or even Slides
Have students create informational videos about each animal using Clips, iMovie, Adobe Spark, or other movie editors
Have students create the "battle" scene of one of the outcomes using Clips, iMovie, Adobe Spark, or other movie editors
Use MMM's teaching resources to help you with the following lessons (released to you if you sign up for them)
- Visual arts lesson plan
- Haiku lesson plan
- Humanities lesson plan
- Research for life sciences lesson plan
- Other life sciences lesson plan
Get a staff tournament going! I participated in this my first year I knew about the tournament. Thanks to Matt Reynolds and the ISBerne team. It was a lot of fun!