2023 March Picture Book Madness

The Why

As I was walking out from my job interview at my new school last spring, I saw a huge display on the library wall: March Book Madness. I learned it was a whole school event. And I have been seeing more and more librarians and teachers doing versions of March Book Madness over the years.

Back in 2013, I teamed up with my “sister classroom” teacher friend, Brian Wyzlic, to do a small version of March Book Madness with 7th and 8th grade language arts students using three genres of novels and picture books.

In 2015, the same year in which I started #ClassroomBookADay, Tony Keefer & Scott Jones took their classrooms’ version of March Book Madness even wider, with a site for schools all over to participate together.

This all came together in my mind as I was thinking about Read Across America this year. Being the first year in my new school, I wanted to do some sort of schoolwide celebration around literacy for March, and since the feedback I heard from staff at the school was overwhelmingly positive about last year’s “tournament,” I decided to really go for it – which meant I needed to pick some books!

The How

Instead of using someone else’s list, I wanted to customize one specifically for my school. With the number of days we had available due to a March spring break week, I decided to start with 16 titles. Initially, I printed a report from Follett Destiny® of the picture books with more than one copy in our school library. I went through that list and eliminated any they used last year, and I also highlighted my favorites. Then I narrowed it down to 16 titles, based on themes I felt would be good for our students to hear at this time. After that preliminary list, I did a diversity audit to ensure we would have an inclusive selection that mirrored our global society and to include some informational fiction. I wanted to ensure as many as possible in my school’s community could feel seen in the event. I also wanted to include a couple of outside-the-box thinking humorous and surprising titles I thought elementary students would connect with, along with some SEL and mental health titles.

I conferred with my library assistants and literacy coach, plus my principal and curriculum director, about the list. Because it would be a schoolwide event, I wanted to get other perspectives and opinions, and to ensure that all parties who might be approached about it were looped in. Finally, I looked at the pairings and, using my own expertise as well as a critical analysis of balancing each side of the bracket at the start and in later rounds, I decided on my pairings.

The Books

You can find my March Book Madness list for this year below and directly in Titlewave® also!

Follett Classroom has partnered with me to spread the #ClassroomBookADay message. As part of that, my themed picture book recommendation lists are housed in Titlewave, one of my favorite free databases for looking up all things related to book information! Don’t have your free account? Grab it today.

The Preparation

Last year, some of the staff did video read alouds for the titles, and the library ensured they had multiple copies of the books so teachers could choose how they wanted to share them with their classes. I knew I would need a few things to prepare:

16 picture book titles with multiple copies available
A bracket image with the selected books, for projecting in classrooms and digital displays (Feel free to grab a copy in Slides here if you’d like!)
A printed visual bracket with the selected books – we ended up connecting with a local graphics/printing company who took my bracket design and printed it on a 5 foot wide vinyl banner for the hallway display that we can just tape book covers on
Links to recorded video read alouds of each title
Google Sheet for voting on each pairing with tabs for each round – having teachers just do a raised hands count felt easier than having to access Google Forms & let kids vote when the books are fresh in their minds
A calendar to track how many books need to be read in which days/weeks

We will be revealing the bracket at the end of the month at our schoolwide assembly and giving teachers a calendar for reading days, voting days, and rounds of the tournament. I was also able to partner with a local print shop to get a vinyl banner that we can reuse year after year and just tape the book covers on it to make it easier to kick off March Book Madness each year! We will be dropping off the books to grade level teams each morning and collecting them to rotate, to try to make it as easy as possible for them to participate. I can’t wait to see how much excitement we can build around reading and kidlit, and how the votes end up!