Well Hello! My name is Marie Hyson and I am a teacher at MC Perry Elementary located on Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. We are a Department of Defense school. This means we are a school for military and civilian children that are stationed outside of the United States. We are located on military bases all over the world as well as in the United States or what we call CONUS.
I have been doing activities related to the Iditarod for about 15 years and have been able to use the Iditarod in any subject area and grade that I have taught. This year with my Multiage class of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders we will be participating in the Trail Mail activity. My students will also pick an individual musher to follow; we will be making flat mushers this year to post around the school. These mushers will have the picture of the musher and then important information about that musher. I have placed maps in the cafeteria and we track the mushers so the entire school sees what is happening in Alaska. We read an array of books and we watch many of the Iditarod videos that I have purchased from the website. I also purchased the Iditarod Insider that I use in my classroom to build background knowledge of my students. They love watching the movie clips and we have actually been able to follow the finish live the last two years. Last year we even made snow with a craft set and the kids played with a plastic husky and sled in the snow. I do a great deal of projects based on the books I read and create activities for the different abilities of my students. We have made rice filled puppies in the past. My students have created sleds in small scale and then have had to tell why they made the choices they did in creating their sled. We walk around school in a sled line and I use the Gee and Haw commands. The looks we get from the middle schoolers and high schoolers is priceless but boy my students know what is happening! I start my Iditarod unit right after the winter break so that we are working on the Iditarod for at least a 3 month period. I use many of the activities from the workbooks purchased from the Iditarod web site as well as the activities posted online.
Last year we participated in the quilt for a school on the Northern Route and while we were creating this quilt I took pictures of each student and their block and created a book online and then had it published. The kids love checking it out of the school library. I have found that my students get so much out of this unit and so do the parents. I have students and parents calling me or stopping me at a store and telling me the latest information they found out about the race. This is one unit where the students are really engaged in learning and that even after having the students in Multiage the students want to learn more. These are just some of the things that we are doing in my classroom for the Iditarod. The world is not as big as we thought after all.
