St. Athanasius Academy: The World Wide Web ... contued research

St. Athanasius Academy: The World Wide Web ... what a resource! gave you an overview of a couple of Internet based projects the Littles and I are working on.

We've gotten updates from the Dussaults -- Rebecca did a race in Europe, preparatory to heading to Turin and the Olympics, which start this Friday! We are getting updates by email and they've added a blog which her husband, Sharbel, will be keeping updated. It's pretty cool to be this "close" to an Olympic athlete and "watch" her performance unfold.

We also chose our Musher today for our eIditarod project. Lego Maniac and String Bean chose 11-time Iditarod musher, Lynda Plettner -- not because her dogs have good form or because she's experienced -- but because we've seen her on two videos we borrowed from the library and they "know" her. She runs a kennel and seriously loves her dogs. Here's an excerpt from her website:

The 2002 Iditarod was Lynda’s best ever, not only because of receiving the “Most Improved Musher Award”, which moved her from sixty-sixth place in 2001 to twentieth in 2002, but because of receiving the prestigious and most coveted “ Leonhard Seppela Humanitarian Award”. This award is presented by the veterinarians working on the Trail, and is given to the musher with the healthiest, happiest and biggest dog team arriving in Nome. Lynda says that she had “thirteen barking, happy, line pounding dogs at the finish line”. This indeed was her best experience of her mushing career and she is looking forward to many more.

We emailed her that we'd be rooting for her and she sent us a lovely email a few hours later -- giving us info about her team this year and talking about her dog ARGE, featured in one of the videos we watched, "Sled Dogs: An Alaskan Epic".

We also started charting our data for the Mystery Class project. For our area of South Carolina -- we added 13 minutes of photoperiod from last Monday (yes, Spring is coming with it's longer days) and charted the 10 mystery class data points for last week. The class we're assigned - Mystery Class #6 - recorded 24 HOURS! of photoperiod last Monday. This is a fascinating project with math, science and geography all rolled into one project.....

Ah, the Internet -- what a great homeschooler's resource!