Thursday, February 21, 2008

we have mushers! :-)

It took us several days of research (mostly looking for the cutest dogs... I must admit) but we have finally picked our mushers to follow during this year's Iditarod. We picked three but officially we have one musher for our family that we listed on the eIditarod site.

Here are the kids with their info sheet about our musher, Hugh Neff...

Here's Alex with his sheet about his musher, Gerry Willomitzer...
And finally, Clara with her sheet about her musher, Jennifer Freking....
(how do you like Clara's vacant stare in this photo? lol!)

I found some musher bio sheets on the internet but they weren't geared for current mushers. It had places to list death information and other stuff that didn't apply. It became too much to modify so I just typed up a quick sheet using StartWrite so they would trace the questions and have blanks to fill in their answers which they found on the bio pages I linked to above and had printed out for them (whew... that was quite the run-on sentence).

With our musher bios complete... we sat down to read...
L is for Last Frontier: An Alaska Alphabet

We had checked it out at the library a few weeks ago and had never read it, so we decided today was as good a day as any! We've read a few of the other books from this series and enjoyed them. This was a nice light overview of the state with more details in the margins for when we wanted to know more.

We also did a little more work on our Sled Dog Lapbook that we had gotten from Homeschoolestore. Today we learned about the actual sled team and the different positions within the team. I thought our sled team mobile from a few weeks ago was just for fun... but today it was a handy visual aid! We were able to identify most of the positions from our little team. The kids have also added a little lego musher on the sled. :-)

We're getting very excited about the beginning of the race!

1 comment:

A Family On Fire said...

Hey Tracie, its Jessica. I just had a couple quick questions ... how do you like the StartWrite program? I looked around their site a little but am still not completely sure how to use it with your schooling. Any input or tips? Also, what is the Homeschoolstore? Is it an online resource or something local for you? Wow, so many more questions! And just when I thought I was starting to get an idea on things too - LOL. I love your activities though so any input or direction you could offer would be great!