It’s March and that means spring, warmer temperatures and basketball playoff games!  Why not add some excitement to your class by adding a Dessert Madness Championship?  This can be around general or specific desserts such as muffin madness, cookie madness, pie madness, ice cream madness…you get the idea. This also makes for a great bulletin board display if you choose to enlarge everything!  

Set

• Begin by asking students to name their favorite dessert. This can be done via a google form, pen and paper or by having them create a Thin Slide with their response.  Students then share and you tally up the results to create the bracket.  If you have overlap and don’t have 12 different desserts, add a few of your own to the mix. This can be done with individual unit desserts too such as favorite muffins, cookies, pies, ice cream, etc.  Just tailor your Thin Slide accordingly!
• Create the bracket using this 12 Team Editable Bracket.  Just fill it in and save it.  Here’s a sample of how it looks at this point.

Materials

• iPads or Laptops
• Screen & Projector
• Championship Dessert Ingredients (optional)
• Bulletin Board Supplies (optional)

Activities

• Decide how often you will poll your students so that the championship lab falls at the end of the month. Depending on when you start, you may be polling students daily, every other day or once a week.  
• To poll students, create a google form titled Would you rather eat….Dessert A or B? (fill in dessert names from student favorites) for each round and let google give you the results.  If you want to go paper and pencil ballots, that works too. 
• Once you have the results, move the winning dessert to the next line to compete with the next dessert. Continue to poll and update the brackets until you get to the final championship.
• An optional lab at this point would be for students to actually prepare and sample the two final desserts in class before they give their favorite in the final poll. However, if you don’t have the resources to do this, then just poll to declare a winner.
• If you are creating a bulletin board of this playoff championship, it might be fun to add pictures, descriptions, trivia, etc. to the board for students to learn more about each dessert as they move through the bracket.  These could be done by assigning each student or pair of students a dessert to research and then putting them in charge of adding the information to the bulletin board.  
• Once all the info for each dessert is up there, you could create a trivia game to see who has actually read the information.  It would be titled, “What dessert am I?”

Attachments

• Favorite Dessert Thin Slides Template (please make a copy if you wish to edit)
• Editable 12 Dessert Bracket Template (website)
• SAMPLE Bracket
• Popular Desserts (website)