more iditarod stuff today...

Today we started our Hands of a Child Sled Dog lapbook we got from Homeschoolestore (it was their free lapbook a few weeks ago). The kids were so excited to get started after we spent some time over lunch looking at musher profiles on the Iditarod site. A lot of mushers have websites where you can see their teams. I have a feeling that Alex and Clara are going to follow the musher with the cutest dogs... LOL!

Oh before we got started on the lapbook, we did the Alaska map worksheet I found on Enchanted Learning. The kids did pretty well with it.... it was good practice with map skills. We also got out the globe (as you can tell in the photo below). Slight rambling ahead... I LOVE globes! I have started (unofficially) collecting them. It's amazing to me that you can buy them for about $10-20 at antique stores. I know they may not be completely accurate, but they're close enough for what we use them for. And with having them scattered throughout the house, we use them quite a bit.

Okay... back the lapbook.... this is our second official lapbook project. Last time I think I overdid it. We did too much the first day. Today we just did the first two sections... the history of sled dogs and the main types or breeds. Much more manageable... plus it gave us the opportunity to follow some "rabbit trails".

So, today we got our older version of the book below...DK Encyclopedia of the Dog

The kids love to look at it anyway... but it has great color photos of the different breeds of dogs we talked about today (oh... except the Alaskan Husky... which isn't in this book but was in our lapbook). We took quite a bit of time comparing the different the dogs... how they were alike and how they differed.
We looked up where they originated from on the globe too. It was a good little project.

Thank you Tracy and Alice for the book suggestions! I have the following books in my Amazon cart... but I haven't done anything with them yet...

Woodsong by Gary Paulsen
Dogteam by Gary Paulsen
Togo by Robert J. Blake
Akiak by Robert J. Blake
Balto and the Great Race (we have a Balto book but this is at a higher reading level)
The Mystery on Alaska's Iditarod Trail by Carole Marsh (just for fun since Alex loves mysteries right now... however, I'll have to convince him that it is okay to read book #8 without reading any of the ones before it... sigh)

Alice, also thanks to your suggestion, I have PBS Nature: Alaska DVDin my queue at Netflix (this is the disk that the Sled Dogs episode is on). I wasn't able to find the other DVD on Netflix, but I'll try the library next.

Thanks again for the wonderful suggestions! :-)