Iditarod..

This will be our second year following the iditarod and I thought I would give a little background the race, why we are doing it and lits a few webistes if anyone else is interested in the race. We first became really aware of the race after reading the story of Balto, a famous sled dog. The story was part of our curicculum ( Sonlight) and sam really enjoyed it. He got very interested in the sport of dog sled racing and it kind of snowballed from there. The first race was run in 1973 to commemorate the famous run made by several dog sled teams ( the last and longest leg was run by balto and his team) to get life saving diptheria medicine to the town of nome. The race is approximately 1049 miles and alternates between two routes each year. Each team has to pass certain check points and is allowed so many rest breaks and overnight stops. A musher can drop dogs from his team during the race but can't add them.

We followed the race in a very basic way. We each chose a musher and then sam and I made up a chart with each of their names and all the check points. We also did a map of the route. We checked their progress on line each day and updated the chart accordingly. I can't remember now whose musher won, I think it was M's. We aso did some stuff on the geography and climate of alaska and watched clips of the race on line. Think we will go a bit more in depth this year as sam is that much older and able to do more writing and figuring things out.

The most useful sites we found were:

www.cabelasiditerod.com
ww.iditarod.com
the yahoo group eiditarod@yahoogroups.com ( this is run just for teachers and homeschoolers by a great guy named walter)
If you like lapbooking then www.handsofachild.com have a great iditarod lap book that you can down load for about $6.