The students read at home out loud to an adult and write down how many minutes they read each night in their special Idita-Read folders. Each minute read equals 4 miles along the trail! I have the checkpoints out in the hall by our room and each day they move their dogsled markers along, checkpoint by checkpoint, on their way to Nome. They are to beat the Red Lantern Musher into Nome from the real race. It is 268 minutes of reading from Anchorage to Nome. They are so excited about it! They are planning how many minutes they will read each night with their friends instead of what tv program they want to watch. Several are past the half-way point (we started last week), so they might just get to Nome and turn around and try to make it back to Anchorage!

Don't forget about STONE FOX. This book is the beginning of this race, or so legend has it. It's a great read aloud or group book.
Then we watch the movie with Buddy Ebsen as the grandpa.

There are books and ideas about the Iditarod at Scholastic.com!

I've done this. I'll read them Balto then explain a bit about the race. I put up a map of Alaska with the route highlighted. We usually track a musher who is from our state then record daily how far he has traveled. This ties in geography skills and using their double/triple digit addition skills. We've even emailed our musher encouraging him on. At the end I show the movie Balto.

We read the book Black Star, Bright Dawn by Scott O Dell. We used www.iditarod.com and had students choose a musher. They have musher biographies on the website. Then each day, we would use the website to track the mushers in the race. There are teacher ideas on the website as well. I wish I could remember more for you, but it was years ago. The kids loved it, though.

The Iditarod race starts on Saturday, and I thought it would make for a very interesting unit. Has anyone ever done a unit on the Iditarod and be willing to share some of their ideas??