STOP THE PRESSES! A local resident has just announced that he is going to be a musher this year. Your paper needs to do a background article so that people will know just what this is all about. Your editor just raced in to tell you that you have the assignment and she needs an article on the Iditarod to go into this afternoon's edition!

Using the 5 W's of reporting and the sites below prepare a brief report to explain just what the Iditarod is.

You only have a single class period to do this so you'll need to organize your ideas and report back quickly! Remember that you are trying to both inform people about something they've never heard about before and excite them about the Iditarod. Make sure to include some new vocabulary words that you come across.

Good news there is plenty of information on the Internet so you can skim through these articles to collect your facts.

• Iditarod Official Pages
  
  
• Iditarod National Historic Trail
  
  
• Iditarod: Race Across Alaska
  
  
• Dogsled.com
  

So, how did you do? The best way to decide if you did a good job is to have someone who doesn't know about the Iditarod read your article. Take your article home and have your parents or an older relative read it. Did the article get them interested about the Iditarod? Do they now know enough to tell others about the Iditarod?