It’s ALL About the Little Things
The 25th — Paths to Connect
You don’t have to plan an elaborate Iditarod unit to bring the excitement of the Last Great Race into your classroom. Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. Every student has a different learning path, and the Iditarod gives us a unique way to create new paths, make connections, and discover possibilities along the way.
For our students, the Iditarod becomes part of our team culture through small, meaningful connections woven into our everyday learning and routines. A locker tag with a musher on it, a checkpoint reference down the hall, an Ikidarod bulletin board, an Iditarod-inspired welcome sign, or a simple “Trail Ready” poster outside each of our classrooms to assist students in remembering behavioral expectations.
A manageable and meaningful way to extend the Iditarod beyond your classroom is through a Trail of Books. Set up a reading competition using the mileage (1049) of the Iditarod, the southern route checkpoints, and the end of the Iditarod 2027. By posting this challenge in the hallway, students are exposed to the checkpoint names every time they travel from class to class. The whole 6th grade has been challenged to read 1049 books before The Teacher on the Trail reaches Nome. From checkpoint to checkpoint, their progress will be seen through book spines listing the title, author, and how many paws the book was rated. There are many variations you could use with this competition to make it your own.
Our school librarian joined the journey by creating a reading challenge inspired by the race. She turned her love of Harry Potter and Hogwarts-themed library and transformed it into Dogwarts for this year. Students are placed into house kennels, complete a Dogwarts Book Form, earn points for their kennel, and one kennel will end victorious at the end of the year and earn a Finish Line Sundae Celebration. I hope these ideas provide some simple ways to connect literacy, imagination, and the Iditarod while showing students that the trail doesn’t have to stay inside one classroom—it can wind its way through the entire school.
The goal isn’t to make every lesson about the Iditarod. Instead, it’s about creating little moments that make students curious and help them see that learning can happen along their learning path, across subjects, and beyond the classroom. By the time the race begins, students have already been immersed in the Iditarod without even realizing how many connections they’ve made.
