Go Team!

1. Athletes love to hear fans cheer! An encouraging word at the last leg of a race might spur an athlete across the finish line faster. Signs, cheers, the wave, all of these things motivate players on a team.
2. Pennants and banners help get the message across visually. Even when other fans are yelling loudly, a sign can still be seen.
3. On large white paper, draw a long, triangle with Crayola® Erasable Colored Pencils. Use a straight edge to draw the lines straight.
4. Pick a team to support. What are their colors? Emblem? Mascot?
5. With Crayola Twistables, letter your encouragement large and clearly for all to read. Draw team symbols such as a powerful tiger claw.
6. Cut out the triangle with Crayola Scissors. Erase any extra colored pencil marks.
7. Glue the wide end of the triangle around a cardboard tube with Crayola School Glue. Air-dry the pennant.
8. Decorate the tube, too. GO TEAM!

LA: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.

LA: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.

LA: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.

MATH: Recognize a statistical question as one that anticipates variability in the data related to the questions and accounts for it in the answers.

MATH: Understand that a set of data collected to answer a statistical question has a distribution which can be described by its center, spread and overall shape.

MATH: Recognize that a measure of center for a numerical data set summarizes all of its values with a single number.

SS: Explore factors that contribute to one's personal identity such as interests, capabilities, and perceptions.

SS: Use appropriate resources, data sources, and geographic tools to generate, manipulate, and interpret information.

VA: Intentionally take advantage of the qualities and characteristics of art media, techniques, and processes to enhance communication of experiences and ideas.

VA: Select and use the qualities of structures and functions of art to improve communication of ideas.

VA: Integrate visual, spatial, and temporal concepts with content to communicate intended meaning in artwork.

Working in small groups, students investigate a particular professional sport. Groups gather statistics on chosen teams. Once organized, the class graphs data for each team. Discuss the comparison of teams to answer specific student-designed questions. These questions could include a look into batting averages, income, time-on-the-field, etc.

Have students read We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson. Students investigate statistics for individual Negro players. Students design a ""playing card"" for each studied player, sketching the player on the front of the card and including statistical information about the player's record on the back of the playing card. "

Organize a class trip to a local professional, or semi-professional, sports team. Prior to the field trip, students discuss the rules of the sport and the records of each team to be playing. After the trip, students post their reaction to attending the game on a class blog.