Hello fellow Iditarod teachers and thank you for taking the time to check out this month’s lesson! I hope that it finds you well and settling into your new year and new crew. As mushers are diving headlong into their racing season, you educators are doing the same in your classrooms. My hope is that this lesson will provide you with an easy to use idea that focuses on skill work, and also help make students love reading that much more.
October’s lesson is titled, “Trail-Twisting Tongue Tanglers” and it focuses on student reading fluency and decoding skills as well as trying their hand at writing as well. Attached is a collection of tongue twisters for the littlest Iditarod lovers. These should not only help get them smiling for their silliness about the race, but also help them in their journey of decoding and mastering fluency. Just like racers must sort through their team and choose which dogs work best for their race, you will also want to sort through the tongue twisters, choosing which work best for your specific grade level. Feel free to then give students a specific letter as a springboard for their own creation. This will be great writing practice. I can already imagine students sitting shoulder to shoulder smiling as they attempt to read each one with fluency and accuracy! They will hopefully love DIGging in and becoming better readers!
“Trail Techy” for this month is another activity directly related to the lesson. Fluency in itself is about trial and error. Students will make mistakes, decide how to correctly decode a word, and try again. This in itself is computer science and coding! It is incredible how many things we do every day are directly related to computer coding with a simple twist in thinking! Check out these vocabulary words…
Bug- an error in code
Debugging- correcting an error in code
Just as computer coders find errors and fix them, students will find errors in their reading and fix them. “Decoding” a word IS computer science! If you would like a plugged-in activity for students to use on their devices, download the FREE “Scratch Jr.” app. Have students create 2 Iditarod sled dog characters. Then use simple block codes to make the dogs walk toward one another and greet each other with an envelope block containing a tongue twister the student created. They can even make a winter trail background! If they find a bug in their code, just practice debugging skills to correct the mistake. The possibilities are endless with this simple to use and student-friendly app that will lead them all the way down the computer coding trail to the finish line!
