This Active Life -- November 2002

Great Ideas

Going Global with GeoPals

Arizona member Barbara Soto links elementary students with e-mail mentors.

Arizona member Barbara Soto retired after 33 years in the classroom. But she just couldn't stop teaching.

So she developed a program, Multiage GeoPals, that is enriching the lives of students at her old school, Reynolds Elementary in Tucson, Arizona. The program, now in its fifth year, links fifth graders with e-mail mentors from across the United States and around the world. The vibrant literacy and geography curriculum now serves 110 students and involves 39 mentors from more than two dozen states and six countries.

Mentors and students communicate weekly, alternating a social exchange with a writing or geography lesson. Lessons include word games, finding out why a place is famous, analyzing fables, or writing their own. Many of the lessons are about geography, a passion of Soto's. Mentors receive weekly templates to guide them.

Mail call is on Monday, when each teacher in the program passes out the printed e-mail messages. (For safety reasons, teachers screen the e-mails, and mentors and students are not allowed to exchange phone numbers or addresses.) "On mail-call day the room is utterly silent while the kids read their letters," Soto says.

The educational goals are to improve students' writing and keyboarding skills, while promoting cross-generational understanding. Teachers tell Soto it works. "Their sentences become longer. They're more selective about adjectives. They use adverbs correctly," she says. "When you practice something you get better at it. Then you're proud of yourself and you get even better."

Students also benefit from the guidance of their adult mentors. "What I like the most about the GeoPals project is that my GeoPal writes very encouraging letters to me," one boy wrote. "He seems to care about my future."

The mentors also enjoy the program. One senior from Ireland wrote that, "I doubt if many fifth graders even know where Ireland is--and here they are finding the little dot on the globe. I can almost feel their amazement that I live on a tiny island, not even as big as Arizona, and yet there are millions of people in the United States we can claim as descendants."

Mentors join in by word of mouth, but Soto needs more. Her pitch is simple: "If you're thinking no one needs you anymore, that's not true. The kids do."

The program is a lot of work for Soto, who revises the curriculum each year, but she doesn't mind. "I like knowing that this small little program is effective in making an intergenerational connection and helping the kids develop their communication skills."

Adapted with permission from the Arizona Education Association Advocate.

For More

Contact Barbara Soto, 5312 East 20th Street, Tucson, AZ 85711. E-mail msplace@earthlink.net.

Also, a GeoPal mentor created a webpage highlighting the project and how to get involved. You can find it at www.geocities.com/geopalsproject/.