Our new musher

Will be Paul Gebhardt. He is the musher who ended up w/our trail mail, so that's cool. Now we can follow Niles' letter in "real time". As of right now, he is number 14 on the trail, although it looks like Lance Mackey will win again this year. Weather has really been a factor.

This has been a wonderful project for Niles to follow. We've posted to the blogs for the checkpoints, learned a lot about Alaska, worked in math projects, animal projects and some great fiction too! I'd highly recommend it for next year. I know that I will get more into it then too, as I'll have more of a handle on how it runs and how homeschooling works. But that's for another post!

Bjornar

It's been a few days since I've had a chance to update [imagine that]. Our musher, Bjornar Andersen, was seriously injured on the trail and had to withdraw from the race. Fortunately, he will recover! We are sorry that he had to withdraw but so happy to hear he will be ok.

Wolverines

Niles learned about wolverines today as part of the Iditarod project. He thought they were cool. :-)

Tracking our Musher

Well the race is on & we've begun to track our musher! Here is where he is right now. Today, we will post a checkpoint message for him and learn about Skwentna. Since this is such an intense project, we are putting our study of early American history on hold until it's finished. :-) That's the great thing about homeschool - you can do that!

written & illustrated by Niles 3/4/09

A Huskys Life by Niles Rosenthal

The musher Dave baht [bought] a dog named Bacon.

and they went home. Bacon was scared and Dave comed [calmed] him down.

and one month later they were off on a race. They were very fast.

The wether [weather] got crazy. There were fast winds. We're doomed Dave thot [thought].

and then he yelled faster! at the dogs and Bacon pulled so hard

that they whun [won] the race.

Today we started working w/seeds & planted some sunflower seeds. Both Luca and Niles got their own little cups to grow them in. They were amazed at how quickly and how much the mulch pellet grew when we added water tothem. :-) We also put 2 lima bean seeds in a ziploc bag w/a wet papertowel to get them to start sprouting. Lima beans are large & easy to work with and so we are using those to see how seeds turn into plants. We are soaking 2 seeds overnight, so Niles can take them apart tomorrow and see what they look like inside. Luca and Niles both colored the different stages of seed - plant and Eliana had to get in on the coloring part as well. It was a good day to do this, as we've had snow and I kept Luca home today so I wouldn't have to go out in the ice and cold. And since it was so cold, a good spring planning activity seemed like the best way to go! As the seeds sprout, we will take pictures and show their progress.