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Curriculum
Students from Wisconsin and the northern states that have snow, know snow. But until we talked about the physical properties of snow, they took it for granted as simply snow. Snow can be very different. The snow I chose for our investigation in a recent Science lesson on matter was light, fluffy snow. The snow …
When some people think of me being the Teacher on the Trail, they think of me on a dog sled racing along. Now I have an adventurous spirit – but not that adventurous. I will actually be flying to different checkpoints along the trail with the Iditarod Air Force, a group of pilot volunteers who …
In order to keep students engaged the last week of school before the Holiday Break, I had them read Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. This is a great book of friendship, family and the love between a boy and his dog. All the things to keep students wanting to turn the page and go …
Temperature in Wasilla, late morning, 20°F, little wind Teachers want to know what works in the classroom to facilitate student learning and to achieve growth in their learning. The research-based document,What Works in Classroom Instruction by Robert Marzano, Barbara Gaddy, and Ceri Dean (http://www.leigh.cuhsd.org/teachers/pdf/Marzano_Strategies.pdf), is a good resource which explains the research behind classroom strategies and …
In my classroom, our study of poetry falls at the end of March. To ease the transition from the Iditarod and Alaska to poetry, I start with The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. “There are strange things done in the midnight sun/By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret …
The Iditarod and its race statistics make math real-life situations for students, helping them understand how math is used in everyday life. Use these math problems for practice, homework, extra credit, review, or in middle school at the beginning of class to focus students on an independent activity. Some teachers call these “at the bell” …
This lesson plan addresses several different skills for students. It’s written for sixth graders, but can easily move up in grade levels. Most eighth graders write a term paper, and this lesson introduces younger students to doing research both on the Internet and using print media in preparation for the term paper. Skills covered are …
As a sixth grade English/language arts teacher, one of my responsibilities is to teach students word processing. By sixth grade, most students are familiar with the mouse, the delete button on the keyboard, and have a general idea of where the letters are on the keyboard. Formatting a document, though, is something they usually aren’t …
The dogs of the Iditarod are athletes and get the kind of training and health care human professional athletes get. Volunteer vets man the race’s checkpoints to examine teams as they arrive throughout the race. These dogs have been cleared physically by a pre-race exam which includes bloodwork, EKG, and a physical exam. This article, …
GPS—how did we get anywhere without it! Enter your destination and drive to it! No map unfolding and refolding—map refolding is challenging—it never ends up the way it looked before it was used. GPS directs us to locations using coordinates that map the world. Latitude, longitude, number lines, space, spheres. Coordinates plot points on graphs, …