Football in the Classroom: Super Bowl Activities for Kids
The Super Bowl- A Real Life Teaching Point
The Super Bowl, an American social activity brings with it many opportunities for a real life teaching point. From geography to science, capture the enthusiasm surrounding the Super Bowl with these fun and interactive learning activities.
Geography Activity
When you think of classroom Super Bowl activities for kids, you may be focused on the football aspect of the Super Bowl. Luckily for all of your students who are not football fans, there are plenty of aspects of the Super Bowl that are not directly related to football. One of these aspects is the cities that the competing teams come from. Let students choose one of the two cities and research important facts about it, from its population to its history, and everything in between. You can even have groups of students prepare presentations on one of the locations and present them to the class.
Math Activities
Math teachers can also use various Super Bowl activities to review concepts with their students. For example, they could give students a specified amount of money that they have to spend for a trip to the Super Bowl. Encourage them to search online for the best deals they could get on tickets, airfare, and accommodations that still sticks within their budget. Include food in the budget as well, letting students choose between eating at a restaurant and bringing their own home cooked food. If they choose the latter, they can use the ads from their local grocery stores to make sure that purchasing all of the ingredients will keep them within their budget.
Alternatively, students who are advanced in math analyze the statistics of the players or the teams involved in the Super Bowl. They can even read graphs and charts describing the statistics of the commercials shown during the Super Bowl. Both of these Super Bowl-related math activities can help them understand how statistics work and can give them practice in analyzing graphs and charts.
Language Arts Activity
Although language arts teachers can have students write about any aspect of the Super Bowl - whether it interests them, what their favorite part is, or the history behind it - they can also use the Super Bowl to teach students higher level analytical skills. Show students ads from the Super bowl and help them analyze them, using rhetoric-related vocabulary such as “bandwagon,” “straw man,” “generalization,” and “red herring.” At the end of this Super Bowl activity, students should understand how Super Bowl ads work. Encourage them to work in groups to write a Super Bowl ad for the product of their choice.
Science Activities
Football is full of physical science concepts, as much as students have a hard time believing it. You can slow down a pivotal play from the game and show students how physics concepts that they have learned, such as the Law of Conservation of Momentum, velocity, and inertia, all contributed to how the play turned out. This Super Bowl activity will help students understand how the laws of physics play out in real life, and football fans will become especially motivated to understand the underlying concepts more thoroughly. (Similarly, you can use the concept of a roller coaster to teach students many physics concepts.)
These classroom Super Bowl activities for kids will help you motivate students to learn and practice their skills by tapping into the popularity of the Super Bowl.
This post is part of the series: Sports-Related Lesson Plans and Activities
Wondering how to teach about physics using a basketball? Curious about whether you can incorporate the Super Bowl into your language arts lessons? This series of articles gives you sports-related lesson plans and activities you can use to incorporate sports into the classroom.
