Ideas for Incorporating Math Learning into your Super Bowl Plans

Football + Math: Ideas for Incorporating Math Learning into your Super Bowl Plans

This is an exciting time of year for football fans of all ages. On February 4, 2018, the New England Patriots will face the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII. And kids all over the country will be watching!

As the Super Bowl nears, football enthusiasts are talking about player’s stats, offensive and defensive plays and speculating as to who will emerge victorious. You can also use Super Bowl excitement as a new and innovative ways to teach kids about….. math. YES! Football is a great way to teach both young and older kids about some basic and more advanced math concepts. Here are some ideas for incorporating math learning into your Super Bowl experience.

For toddlers/ preschoolers:

●     The little kids love to watch the on screen action! You can also do good with all that screen time by teaching your kids number identification. Just by watching the players’ jerseys on the screen, you can start with simple number identification. Take that lesson to the next level with this cute number identification game using cut out footballs and caricature players.

●     For the preschooler that knows more than just his number recognition, football is the perfect way to do simple addition. And you can do it from your couch! A team scores a touchdown? Ask your kid what number is added to 6 to make 7. And the next play when your favorite team scores only a field goal? Ask her by how much the other team is winning.

For grade schoolers:

●     Older kids are likely more into watching football and therefore more receptive to the amalgamation of sports and math. Families can use football watching for a more complicated equation like: What are the different math equations that get you to 21 points? 18 points? Or, get really creative and pick a random number like 11. (It might include some plays that you don’t see very often!)

●     Different scores get different numbers. So what kind of scores do I need to get to 16? (Answer 2 TD, 2 PATs, 1 safety, a touchdown, one PAT and three field goals, 2 TD and two 2 point conversions.)

●     Older kids can also use football to compute averages (rushing yards), completion percentage, third down conversion percentage, completion percentage of quarterbacks or the field goal percentage of the game’s kicker. Kids can also track the mean, median and mode of the punter, field goal kicker for their lengths of kicks.

●     You can also create great word equations to figure out what yard line the player might be on using simple addition and subtraction equations.

For middle schoolers:

What tween doesn’t like YouTube? With these math collaboration videos between the National Science Foundation and the NFL, your kid can learn basic math concepts like the Pythagorean Theorem and more.

On that note, in “Football by the Numbers,” EA Sports also partnered with Madden NFL, NFLPA and Discovery Education an interactive educational game lesson plans that allow kids to play football games that teach math!

If your child complains about the integration of math learning into his sports viewing, be sure to remind him of former NFL star John Urschel, math whiz and MIT grad. He picked the number 64 for his jersey because it was a perfect square AND perfect cube.

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