'Meet Me at the Corner' Web Site Offers Virtual Tours

SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 12/11/2007 11:00:00 AM

If your students have ever ached to climb the Empire State Building, peek in at a New York City cultural event, or bird-watch in Central Park, check out the new Web site MeetMeAtTheCorner. Targeted at the nation's estimated 1.9 million home-schooled children, the site's virtual field trips can be enjoyed by any students, ages 8 to 12. 

On the site are about a dozen three- to four-minute video podcast tours of New York landmarks and events—from the Forbes Galleries and urban chess games to the Chili Pepper Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—as well as visits with writers like D'Anne Love and Dan Gutman, illustrator Jeff Hopkins, and Bruce Cannon, artistic director of the Swedish House Marionette Theatre.

Each video has educational features, as well. The Empire State Building tour, for instance, offers suggestions about related books, a link to the Skyscraper Museum, downloadable coloring pages, and fun facts about those awe-inspiring buildings in the sky.

Kids interested in interviewing people in their communities and making their own videos are invited to submit them to the Web site. MeetMeAtTheCorner provides "how-to" instructions. And site personnel are available to edit and upload the videos.

"Many of the materials currently offered to home-school parents are quite traditional and make minimal use of the Web," says site creator and children's author Donna Guthrie. "With MeetMeAtTheCorner, I am providing a forum for children across the country to share their journeys with their peers via the internet.

"I really see MeetMeAtTheCorner as being the educational You Tube or [now-defunct] Zoom for the preteen set."