Kid's Corner
January/February 2008

The students in Boulder, Colorado, loved this project. Will and Alex share their firsthand account:

Each of us chose a musher to follow. We kept a big map of the trail in the hallway and moved our “dogs” on the maps. Lots of us wrote to our musher, and we follow them every year. Cim Smyth even wrote back to Alex, and they write each other every year. For the Ikidarod, one kid was the musher and three or four kids were dogs. We put backpacks on plastic kid sleds with all our gear in it. The kid dogs acted like real dogs—barking, panting, howling, and pulling on the ropes. The musher had to control the dogs using real terms. The trail was all around our playground, with obstacles we had to go through. At certain checkpoints, the mushers had to put booties on their paws and feet, and water their dogs.

Looking for a fun way to bring the outdoors inside this winter?

Get you favorite junior musher and use some of our suggestions to follow in the footsteps of “the last great race on earth”—the Alaska Iditarod—by holding your very own “Ikidarod.” The Iditarod starts March 1 at 10 a.m.

• Trace a map of Alaska onto parchment paper, then draw the Iditarod’s 1,150-mile route from Anchorage to Nome with the many checkpoints along the way. Pick your favorite musher and keep tabs on his or her progress online at www.iditarod.com.
• Calculate the mileage from the starting line to each checkpoint, then calculate the remaining miles to the end of the race. You can graph finishing times too.
• Brush off those old copies of Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang or check out Iditarod books for younger readers at www.iditarod.com/teachers/iditarodbooks.html.
• Pretend to be a musher and write your own story recounting the Iditarod, or flip it around and write from a race dog’s point of view. You can even write a letter to your favorite real-life musher.
• Learn the commands used by professional mushers (“gee” for right and “haw” for left; check out www.iditarod.com/learn/terminology.html for a complete list), then map out your own neighborhood, put together a few race teams of dogs (played by kids) and mushers, and start your very own Ikidarod.

Go to www.ultimateiditarod.com to learn how a real team is trained.