We have recently begun a student correspondence program (or a pen pal program) at our school at the St. Vincent de Paul -- Adult Learning Center (SVDP--ALC) in Gentilly in New Orleans.  This school is one of the many service sites for Literacy*AmeriCorps (L*AC) in the Greater New Orleans area.  In this program the students will write questions for our pen pals who live far away and also comment briefly about their lives in New Orleans. Then Sr. Lory Schaff, the school's director, and I will email these questions off to the pen pals.  The pen pals are people involved in either education or academic or scientific research, usually.  Hopefully, this pen pal program will grow and other service sites will form their own student correspondence programs which greatly aid in teaching many literacy skills, in practice, from geography to writing skills to science and math and more.
 
The basic idea for this program began around Christmas time 2007 when I began a map reading or basic geography class at SVDP --ALC. Starting out with four maps, the program grew in scope. We first used maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and a world map.
Then we expanded to other maps including a National Geographic map of Antarctica.  Because of high student interest in this, I decided to try to contact people in Antarctica and maybe enter into an email dialogue which could help better educate our students.
 
I contacted an online newspaper called "The Antarctic Sun" which is run by the United States Antarctica Program (USAP) which is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF).  A very thoughtful lady, a communications specialist, at the USAP emailed me back; and together we worked out a plan for a pen pal program between SVDP--ALC and people with the USAP stationed at two US bases in Antarctica -- at McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf and at South Pole Station at the actual South Pole.  Needless to say, this was an amazing educational opportunity for our school; and we are very happy about it!
 
We have already begun our correspondence with several people at the South Pole Station and are awaiting responses from McMurdo. We hope in the near future to publish updates about this subject here at the L*AC blog and in "AmeriWord," the newsletter for L*AC New Orleans, which should be soon on the web too. In fact, we had an introductory article about our Antarctica New Orleans Writing Project in the April issue of AmeriWord.
 
In the future we may expand our program to other places, and hopefully other L*AC service sites will form their own pen pal programs. Such student correspondence projects are highly educational on many levels, and lots of fun too.