Real or Virtual? It is Hard to Tell!

By Laura Collins, Ohio

One of my gifted 6th grade students’ favorite Iditarod activities is to create “virtual dog teams”. Students produce an informational document about their “kennel”, with highlights about the 16 dogs on their “Iditarod team”.
We do all of this on the computers, so students collect images of 16 dogs, name them, assign them positions on a team, and tell about each dog’s strengths and characteristics. It takes some time to do this, but students may choose to work in small groups; most choose to work individually because they enjoy doing it so much! Some students have elected to do a parody team as well, creating silly teams.

This is a great project for descriptive writing, creative writing, internet searching, using documents, and inserting images. Listening to students discuss their work, it would be difficult to tell that they are not discussing real dogs!

Laura Collins

Original Posting Date:  Jun 5, 2008