Great Literature, Now With Road Maps
February 29, 2008
Odysseus may be hopelessly lost, but you and your students don’t have to be. Thanks to Google Lit Trips, you can follow the story from above with all the clarity of Zeus. With the satellite imagery and smooth-sailing style of Google Earth, these tours of the greatest road trips ever written will help your students put what they’re reading into perspective.
There are Lit Trips for all grade levels, from Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The maps are handy enough on their own, but they’re also accompanied by contextualizing photographs (a picture of a dust storm for the first chapters of The Grapes of Wrath for instance) and often discussion questions as well.
There are plenty of epic journeys not up on Lit Trips yet, so if you’re excited about the tool and feeling ambitious, make it a class project to develop one. There has already been a trip developed by a first grade class, so how hard can it be?
A word of caution: beware the allure of detours! I started off following Steinbeck’s Joads to California and ended up on the opposite coast hovering over my parents’ house. -MARIELLE PRINCE
