Iditarod! The Last Great Race!

We just finished our Iditarod unit!  

My class was so excited to go home and watch the race start and end on TV! Each student "adopted" a dog (a pretend dog of course) of their own, so we made these cute husky craftivities to go with our unit:

You can snag your own by clicking the image below:

We also did Adopt-a-dog Journals and wrote friendly letters to our dogs (a couple kids pretended to be the dog instead and write to a musher).  Here are some anchor charts they used for writing in their journals.

If you do an Iditarod unit and want to have your class adopt a dog to write to, you can download the journal and all of my Iditarod activities in one GIANT bundle by clicking the image below:

Dog pile! The AWESOME FOLKS AT WEBKINZ donated a whole class set to me five years ago!  Each dog has a piece of yarn around the neck with a little dogtag for a name (I made up names and a quick description for each dog).  I used the little Avery circle keytags and stamped a paw print on the back.  Each student gets to keep their dog at their desk during the unit...any dogs that "misbehave" (are played with at inappropriate times) get put in the "kennel" (my desk) for the day.    

The Red Lantern Award goes to the very last musher to cross the finish line, a lesson in finishing even if you're not first.  My red lantern sits on the desk of a student who worked really hard to finish their iditadopt-a-dog journal! You can find a red lantern like this one here.

My collection of Iditarod/Alaska books.

What about you? Do you teach about the Iditarod? What lessons do you include? I'd love to hear all about it! Leave me some bloggy love by commenting below!