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Faces of the Last Great Race

Student Checkpoint Report

by Student Essay

03/11/2008

Faces of "The Last Great Race on Earth"

Student Checkpoint

By Mariah

The Iditarod is a 1,000 mile race in Alaska. This doesn't sound like a way to learn to me, or at least it didn't before last year. My fifth grade teacher made it into one of the best ways to learn for most in my class. She made little math booklets for us, and in these books we did math problems that had to do with the Iditarod or Alaska. Trust me; if you have the right teacher the Iditarod is always a way of learning all of the school standards.

Some other ways that she taught us about the Iditarod and covered our state standards are we did a writing assignment about if we were an Alaskan Husky and wanted to race in the Iditarod but our musher picked other dogs what would we say to convince him/her to take us. Some of these writings were shown on the news! Another way was she had us make dog treats. With the ingredients and the amounts of the ingredients needed to make the treats we did a paper with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing the different fractions for the recipe. One other thing that we did was we calculated how much calories a racing dog needs a day and then we went on the internet and looked to see what foods we would have to eat to equal the amount of calories the dogs ate.

One of my favorite things that we did was our musher tracking booklets. We had to keep track of our musher's place everyday, kept track of the weather in Fort Wayne and Alaska to see the difference between the temperatures, and did a biography of our musher all in the same book. My musher's name was Ellen Halverson. She won the Red Lantern Award, which is awarded to the last place team.

After the Iditarod was over, we did a report on anything that interested us. My love for dogs became stronger after our whole Iditarod experience. I decided to do a report over something that had to do with dogs. The Iditarod drove me to do a report over some kind of dog race. I chose the Yukon Quest; this race isn't as popular as the Iditarod but it was still a dog race. This led me to want a dog so bad that I, later, got one in August. The Iditarod had a huge impact on my whole life.

In conclusion, the Iditarod is, in fact, a dog sled race, but it's also a way to learn many things. My teacher made it that way, anyways. The Iditarod can affect many people's lives in many different ways.