Geography Teacher Shows Where It’s At

From Hawaii to Maine--and the 48 states in between--Arlene Johnston’s kindergartners in Solana Vista Elementary School last year learned American geography through a unique pen-pal program, and learned it well enough to beat out high school seniors in a geography competition.

Success like that led Johnston, 26, to receive $10,000 Monday in Washington as the nation’s outstanding geography teacher.

Johnston, a Solana Beach elementary district teacher for three years, survived competition from nearly 500 elementary and secondary teachers entered for the award, which is announced during National Geography Awareness Week. The award is granted by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Rand McNally map company.

“She’s very well-deserving of this,” Stephen Ludwiczak, Johnston’s principal, said Monday. “She’s creative and insightful--it’s amazing what she did with the kids, knowing that they were kindergartners.”

The whole idea for the project began after the class--dictating to their teacher, who would write it on butcher paper--sent a thank-you letter to a Connecticut friend of Johnston’s who had mailed the students colored leaves. Then they designed a birthday card for a young Illinois relative of hers, who also was in kindergarten.

“The kids kept asking, ‘Where is Connecticut? Where is Illinois?’ ” Johnston, on leave this year to pursue a master’s degree in creative arts and storytelling at a Boston-area college, said Monday in a telephone interview.

“So I thought it would be fun to write someone in every state and put the letters up on a big United States map covering the wall of the classroom. I sent a letter home to parents, asking for addresses of friends or relatives in other states, and we ended up writing to those people.”

As they received replies, the students learned not only about the various states--they got samples of bluegrass from their Kentucky pen pal, for example--but also about occupations ranging from nurse to aerospace industry president to television personality.

One class relative was the president of McDonnell Douglas and the aunt of another student knew television’s Mr. Rogers, who wrote the students a letter from Pennsylvania. P. K. Hallinan, an Oregon children’s book author who had used Johnston’s class the previous year as the basis for his book, “My Teacher Is My Friend,” visited several times again after being made a pen pal.

“And it was really fun to hear the kids come into the class in the morning talking about a state they had heard about while playing on the floor as their parents were watching the news on TV,” she said. “They’d ask me whether I had heard that there had been floods in Texas or that a McDonnell Douglas helicopter had been on the news.”

At the end of the school year, the kindergartners challenged seniors at nearby San Marcos High School, Johnston’s alma mater, to a geography contest. The kindergartners won, answering 26 questions correctly to 21 by the seniors.

“We shared a big sheet cake and apple juice, a party kindergarten-style, and I think the high school kids had a really good time as well,” Johnston said.