March 10th is Super Mario Day, for the only reason that when you spell MARIO it really looks like MAR 10, as in March 10th. It was a lucky coincidence that I decided to go with a Super Mario room transformation for a school wide event that happened to be planned exactly on March 10th.
However, at the beginning of the year, I conducted a student interest survey and I learned that my young learners love Mario and Luigi, so I wanted to incorporate their interests in our activities this year. A Super Mario room transformation was also a secret dream of mine after witnessing one of my teacher friends pulling a phenomenal room transformation a few years back. I started gathering materials for quite some time and I designed everything in my mind long before I had the chance to put things in practice. Even so, with months of preparation, this room transformation took a good chunk of time to transfer from vision to reality. Some items were bought, but the majority of them were created by very talented hands {not mine, unfortunately for me!} Take a peak!
As always, to create anticipation, an invitation was sent home, but this time, two days prior. Big mistake. Huge! Normally I only send invitations the night before, but because I didn’t give the parents any heads up this time, I decided to go against my judgement and pass the invitations out two days prior. As you could imagine, the anticipation was too great for students to bear, so the next day, the only topic of discussion in our room was Super Mario and, with it, of course, the never ending questions about what we were going to do and play the next day.
The day of, the students came into my room through a “pipe” in pure Mario style! They exited the same way, which made the day exciting and different right from the start. Of course, I was a stickler for the rules: one could only go through the pipe if their mask was completely covering their mouth and nose and they sanitized their hands prior to entering the “pipe”. Also, equally important: only one student at a time in the “pipe”. I am happy to report that everyone followed the rules gladly. Also, my pipe wasn’t really green, but it did the trick nonetheless. Next year, if I am feeling really ambitious, I will turn my daughter’s baby tunnel into a green pipe by covering it in bulletin board paper and designing a pipe-like entrance. Until then… here’s what the students enjoyed:
The entire day was built with movement in mind, trying to emulate Mario’s moves from the game. We hoped, jumped, and used scooters to move around. Various tasks were placed around the room and students were instructed how to move through levels to power up and, obviously, level up!
It wasn’t hard to create excitement for this theme. The decor and the activities did it for me. I also had the Super Mario soundtrack playing in the background and the music put everyone in a playful mood instantly. To add to that, I may have said the famous phrase “It’s a me, Mario!” one too many times (or maybe 30 too many, but who cares?) and may have given directions in an Italian accent that made some of the kids giggle.
Some of the students came to me with work from gen ed, so I couldn’t really use my materials. To make it fun, they had to collect coins for their work, following the rules, and best behavior. At the end of they day, they were able to use their coins to buy small trinkets from my Super Mario store.
For those students who were working on their IEP goals, I created my own resources. There were several levels the students had to go through, with activities increasing in difficulty from level to level. During the first level, they had to read sight words (individualized Fry lists and K high frequency words) and throw fireballs to try to defeat Bowser. I printed the words on yellow, orange, and red paper to resemble the colors of the fire. I also incorporated some fine motor skills too: after reading the words, they had to crumple the paper into a ball and fire it. The best part from a teacher’s stand point: I didn’t have to laminate those cards and next year it won’t even matter if they are crumpled because the task will be the same!
Another level consisted of the students collecting as many mushrooms as they could to grow bigger and power up! I had individual packets for each student based on their reading level, containing CVC, CVCC, and CCVC nonsense words. I also timed some of the students who were struggling with this skill in Dibels.
To level up, students also collected stars, aka mini erasers in math activities (e.g. task cards and counting activities), as well as coins while working with ten frames to add and subtract within 20.
I tried to incorporate as many elements from the Super Mario game as I could in the activities: flowers, Yoshi and its eggs, ice balls, etc., both for math and reading. However, my favorite activity, and the one that blew everyone’s minds, was the punching board. Mario is famous for punching up in the game, but since I wasn’t creative enough to come up with a way for my students to punch up and get their worksheets or materials, I had to settle for a horizontal punch “in”. I used one of my cubbies, emptied the shelves, and created a safe space for the students to punch in. I figured tissue paper would be the easiest to tear.
Word of advice: make sure you label, take pictures, and create a map of your cubbies before you cover them with the paper because it is a pain to figure out what you put in each cubby once it’s all sealed up. Instructing your students exactly where to stand and where to punch is key, especially if you have multiple grade levels and multiple ability levels for which the work is individualized. Unfortunately, once the board is punched through, it is done, so you want to be precise. The good news is that if you instruct your students to punch right in the middle, where the question mark is, and tell them to gently pull out the materials, the damage to the brown portion of it is minimal and you could reuse it the following year.
You can hide pretty much anything inside the punch board. My students retrieved fluency passages and timers to practice reading. The Kindergarten group had a decodable passage, and first, second, and third grade had non decodable stories. Other students, whose IEP goals were related to identifying uppercase and lowercase letters, discovered a matching game inside their punch space. I also included pencils, timers, fun glasses, and finger pointers to make reading more fun. Needless to say, they loved it and asked if they could punch again the next day.
For the first time ever, one of my third graders realized what the numbers by his passage he read for fluency meant and he couldn’t believe he read 100 words! I was very proud of myself for capturing his a-ha moment!
Part of the game was that the kids not only had to work hard to save Princess Peach, but they also got to reveal Princess Peach’s true identity at the end of the day. My first graders were literally rolling on the floor when I played the special video message for them from Princess Peach who happened to be our male principal. My third graders, who pretty much conducted some serious detective work throughout the day to try to figure out early who Peach was, were so happy that they figured out enough clues to lead them to the conclusion that Peach was the principal.
A great day was had by all! I heard things like: “I love you, Mario”, “I wish I could hug you, Mrs. Sylvander”, and “It was so much fun I didn’t even realized she tricked us into taking a quiz today!”
Everything’s better when more people join in and that was so true about my day. Not just my teacher partner, but our entire interventionists department decided to play along with me and that made my heart smile with joy!
Note to my fellow teachers:
All materials (and then some!) are available on TPT under Super Mario Editable Sped Room Transformation. A lot of them are be editable, so you can play a perfect game, customized to your own students’ needs! Until next time, continue to play and have fun with your students! That’s what they’ll remember about you!
