Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Iditarod Fever Hits 3A!

We are just a few days away from our trip to Alaska, and 3A is suffering from a severe case of Iditarod Fever!


Centerpieces Waiting to be Packed

We have shipped our centerpieces for the Musher Banquet off to a volunteer in Eagle River, Alaska.  We have been tracking our packages (it took five boxes to send twenty-five centerpieces).  We were surprised to see that the boxes headed south to Greensboro, North Carolina before turning west and going to Federal Way, Washington and then finally to Eagle River, Alaska.  All five boxes have now been delivered.We breathed a huge sigh of relief, as they were about five days later than the original estimate!

Tracking our Packages


In math class, we have begun our official Iditarod unit.  We began by studying probability as we tried to predict what musher would win the race.  We looked at the characteristics of gender, experience, and location, and we predict a male, veteran from Alaska will win the race!  We are certain that a female, rookie, from a foreign country will not win.  We make that prediction based on the fact that no one matching that description is entered!  Our probability experiment worked out perfectly when drew the characteristics of mushers to track and our numbers match the actual race numbers! 


Graphing Characteristics of the Mushers Entered in This Year's Race

We wrote a biography card of our musher, got our map set up, and we are all ready to start tracking on the third!


Ready to Track our  Mushers!

We have also used our area and perimeter skills to plan dog runs for a kennel and a floor plan for a checkpoint!  We are now exploring money and calculating change.  We are discovering that mushing is a VERY expensive sport!

We were super excited this week when we got mail from Ely, Minnesota - we got Fennel's Autograph!  Dave had posted a question on the Wilderness Classroom site for ideas on how to get Fennels' autograph and we had the winning idea!  We suggested an ink pad, which worked out just great!  We even got to see a video of Dave and Fennel making the paw print.  It's pretty cool!

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