
DATE: Sunday, March 2, 1997                 TAG: 9703020039

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL  

SOURCE: BY REBECCA MYERS CUTCHINS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:  113 lines

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: * In Sunday's Metro News section, with a story about Portsmouth elementary school students learning about the Internet, a photo caption erroneously identified three fourth-grade students as being from John Tyler Elementary School in Portsmouth. Laura Black, 9, is a fourth-grader at Port Norfolk Elementary School. Courtney Waller, 10, and Sara Wooley, 10, are fourth-graders at Park View Elementary. Also, in the story, Sara Wooley's name mistakenly appeared with the letters cq after her first and last names. Correction published Tuesday, March 4, 1997. * ELEMENTARY STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT INTERNET BY LEARNING THROUGH IT

From a second-floor classroom of John Tyler Elementary School, students are using the Internet to make friends around the world.

They're exchanging haiku with high school students in southern Japan.

They're piecing together a quilt from patches received from schools in the United States, Brazil and Germany.

They're swapping postcards with students from as far away as New Zealand.

And they're e-mailing messages to Missouri and California students who sent their school mascots, Daniel the Dolphin and Redwood Wendy, to the Portsmouth elementary school for mini ``vacations.''

The intercultural e-mail exchanges are projects of Sally Craig's ``Search Lab,'' a program for gifted and talented students from John Tyler, Port Norfolk, Park View, Shea Terrace and James Hurst elementary schools.

``I want them to understand how the Internet can really shorten the amount of time it takes for information to travel and also how many more connections you can make,'' said Craig, who has been teaching gifted and talented students for 12 of her 29 years in teaching.

Because Craig subscribes to a bulletin board specifically geared to educators, she is able to download activities like the ``haiku exchange'' provided by a high school teacher in Fukuoka, Japan.

``We would like to exchange English haiku with any students in elementary school, junior high school or senior high school,'' Kenji Shiramizu wrote in an e-mail message posted to Craig's bulletin board.

Haiku, a Japanese poem often on some subject in nature, has three lines of five, seven and five syllables, respectively, that do not rhyme. Saracq Wooleycq, 10, a fourth-grader at Park View Elementary School, responded to the Japanese teacher's request with the following:

Plants grow all day long.

Some of them are weak, some strong.

All are beautiful.

Although there are five gifted and talented programs in the city, Craig's is the only one with a connection to the World Wide Web.

The modem was acquired by funds from a grant given by the Portsmouth Schools Foundation. The school system furnishes a phone line, and the Merrimac Kiwanis Club pays for the online service.

``I don't allow the kids to actually sit here and do this,'' Craig said, clicking away on the Macintosh's keyboard. ``I don't think that keyboarding is really a skill that elementary children have.

``Right now, at this level, I want them to understand how the Internet works,'' Craig said. ``I want them to understand the process. It's just an awareness, knowing what it is.''

Craig only seeks and downloads activities that provide her students with networking opportunities, she said.

``I try not to connect to any project unless they send us something in return,'' Craig said. ``It's got to be an exchange kind of thing.''

Craig also looks for projects that allow her to teach more than one subject at a time. For example, to promote reading and writing and to involve her students in an interesting geography lesson, Craig signed her classes up for an ``Internet Quilt'' exchange.

In this project, connections were made by e-mail, then schools used the postal service to swap fabric squares representing their school colors and mascots. Handwritten stories about the school were included with each square.

Craig's fourth-grade search students made 30 patches out of yellow felt, each with a tiger's face. Accompanying each square was a letter about John Tyler, which was built in 1947 and named for the 10th president.

The school has received 21 squares since starting the project in September. An intermediate school in Germany sent a patch decorated with green trees and purple grapes. A school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, sent a patch with its coat of arms. The quilt is displayed on a wall outside the main office.

Craig found another geography lesson for her students in the form of a postcard exchange. More than 450 Portsmouth postcards, donated by the city's convention and visitors bureau, have been mailed to schools around the globe since January. John Tyler has received more than 100 in return.

The postcards are displayed on a wall at the entrance to the school, next to a world map and one of the United States. Bright red stickers mark the cities from which the postcards were mailed.

The postcard exchange has been one of the students' favorite projects, Craig said, despite what seems to be a slow response from other schools.

Chantel Artis, 10, a fourth-grader from Shea Terrace Elementary School, has sent six postcards and received just one in return, from a fifth-grader in Hickory, N.C.

``I check the postcards once a week,'' Artis said, ``to see if anyone wrote me back.''

A 7-year-old from Boston made his own postcard for the students at John Tyler. Using colorful markers, he drew himself among blue skies, green grass, a shining sun and a tall tree, and wrote:

Dear Class:

Does it rain a lot? Is it cold there? It is cold here. Hi, my name is Stephen. I live in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts. I am 7 years old. People come from around the world to see our trees ...

``I was getting six or eight a day, but now it's down to about two a day,'' Craig said of the postcards. ``This makes geography come a little bit more alive for our students.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Photo]

JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot

From left, John Tyler Elementary students Laura Black, Courtney

Waller and Sara Wooley are learning about the Internet from teacher

Sally Craig. Craig uses exchanges with other schools to teach

writing, geography and other subjects - along with lessons about the

Internet, the tool they use to make the exchanges.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu

by CNB