I think most people know that I love sports, and if you spend 5 minutes looking at my classroom you can figure that out. I have loved sports my whole life, so I wanted to incorporate sports as something fun for my classes. With it being football season, it was an obvious starting point. I was sitting at home Sunday night, and I was trying to think of a way to incorporate football into my class. It dawned on me that I love doing fantasy football, and there is so much math involved with that. It's clearly more complex for 4th graders to be able to do, but I was determined to think of a way to simplify it. So this is what I came up with.
I started off by asking the kids what they knew about football and the different positions. They would answer, but I made sure to emphasize the different positions (QB, RB, WR, etc). Following that, I showed them my actual fantasy football page that I do with my buddies. The description I gave was that fantasy football is a way to live out my dream of being an NFL even though I am so retired and way to out of shape to play anymore. I talked about all the different players that I had drafted, and how the point projections work. There are three main ways the points work in fantasy football:
1. Yards - Whether its passing, rushing, or receiving yards.
2. Touchdowns
3. Turnovers - Interceptions/Fumbles
I told the kids that their tables groups are going to be their teams. They are in charge of their team, and the players they pick. First, we had to figure out what their team names would be and what logo they would choose. It was funny to hear the names they came up with. I love the Minions, and a lot of them wanted to name their team something with Minions. That makes a guy feel good, ha! After setting up our teams, they were going to pick three different positions: Quarterback, Running back, and Wide Receiver. I had compiled a list of the top ten players at each position. I have a spinner in my class, and had a member from each group spin for the order of the draft. They would look at the list, and they had a limited time to choose a player. It's funny to see some of the boys have an idea of who players are, and then the majority have no idea who any of them were. They picked each position, and kind of felt a little worried about the fact they had really no idea who they picked. I decided that I would go team by team and show them the players that they had chose! It was cool to hear their reactions to the pictures of the players. Like, "Oh he looks really good!" or I even got, "Oh, he's kinda cute!"
The next step was to show them how they were going to score each week. This is math class, and there should and will be math involved. The points are all based on the yardage gained, number of touchdowns, and number of turnovers. They picked real NFL players, and so we are going to use their real stats from their games each week. I set it up like this:
1. 1poinst/yard gained
2. 10 points/touchdown
3. -10 points/turnover (turnovers aren't good)
We went over a practice scoring. I made up numbers, and we worked out how many points each player would have earned. I made sure that they knew the steps involved in the scoring process.
Now why is this fun for them? Well in real fantasy football, you compete against another person or team to win that week. So in class, each group will go up against another group trying to win each week. I'm going keep track of the wins each team earns. I will have anchor charts on the walls with their team names and logos. I'll turn this into a dot plot with the numbers of wins they earn throughout the season. I told them this is going to last all football season, and that's until January. The team that wins the most games will earn a reward of some sort. I haven't decided, but I was thinking like an ice cream party or something. I've got until January to figure it out, ha! The kids like the mystery. They seemed really excited about, and even the girls seemed excited about football. I heard them talking at lunch about going to class,"have you been to math today?!" It's awesome to hear that they are excited to come to math class.
Fantasy Football Friday is going to be apart of my classroom for years (I hope), and I am so excited to get started with this next week! I think this is truly going to be a fun way to end each week, but still doing math at the same time. Hopefully they see it as something fun, and not something that is just more math.
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