INDEPENDENCE, MO — Inside a classroom at William Southern Elementary in Independence, there is a team of first graders preparing for Super Bowl LIX.
Their coach is their teacher, Mrs. Laurie Countryman.
She has been reviewing her roster and preparing her students to be Kansas City Chiefs fans.
It all started when Patrick Mahomes came to town.
“I thought, we can just track as simple as comparing numbers of who won every Monday," Countryman said. "That when they would return, we would compare who won and what the scores were and who had the biggest number.”
It has snowballed in the last three years and now the Chiefs are in Countryman’s math, geography, and even history lessons.
“This is not an annual, but for these kids, that's all they've ever known, is it's a Super Bowl every year." she said. "And so I just want to show them that it has not always been like this. We had a slump, and we went 50 years without.”
Her students are absorbing that lesson.
Just ask seven-year-old Easton Otten what he’s heard about past Chiefs teams.
“They lost a lot of games,” he said.
This year, there is a new lesson. Why is three a magic number?
“Well, three is sometimes a lucky number, and if it was the third, then that would be a three-peat,” said Carter Sheffer.
Countryman has an entire bulletin board dedicated to the number three.
She has read her students Goldilocks and the Three Bears, they play Tic Tac Toe (three in a row) and sound out three-syllable words like quarterback.
“We've been learning about three-peats, and we've been doing math with three numbers,” said Jaiden McConnico.
On top of all that, Countryman is teaching them life skills about being a team player, what makes Patrick Mahomes a leader, and why reading like Mahomes does to his children is so important.
The students have learned that when you have three of something, it can add up to something pretty big… like a three-peat.
