1. Flat Stanley Joins The Family!

I heard something about "Flat Stanley" recently that made me want to learn more about it. I got around to doing that yesterday. After some research, I found out that "Flat Stanley" is a childrens' book by author Jeff Brown. It is about a young boy named Stanley Lambchop who is accidentally squished "as flat as a pancake" when his bulletin board falls on him while he is sleeping.

When Stanley wakes up, he is fine. Just very, very flat. He soon discovers there are advantages to being flat. Such as being able to fold himself up into an envelope and go off on an exciting vacation to California!

As it turns out, this book has spawned projects where children (or adults!) create "Flat Stanley" paper dolls, which they can mail off to locations all over the globe for a short visit with various host families.

The host families would show Stanley around, perhaps do something fun with him, and then fill out a form or write a letter or keep a journal detailing what Stanley saw and did while on his visit and telling Stanley's owner a bit about their location.

They then send Stanley back home with said details. Perhaps they will include photos or small souvenirs of their location. Perhaps they will have Stanley send postcards or emails while he is away.

The end result is that Stanley comes home, and his owner (in this case my eight year old daughter, Alexa) gets to learn about the area Stanley visited. This is a wonderful way to integrate reading, writing, language, social studies, geography, math (how many miles did Stanley travel?) and plain old FUN!

I knew right away that we had to start our very own Flat Stanley summer project. And so we did.

I borrowed the book "Flat Stanley" from the library.

I printed out a bunch of "Flat Stanley" templates and introduction and response letters.

Via email and message boards, I recruited friends, relatives, and close acquaintances to accept visits from Flat Stanley and provide me with mailing addresses- the further away the better- of people they knew who might like a visit from Flat Stanley.

Some people only send out one Flat Stanley at a time and wait for him to come home. Not us. That would take forever! We wanted to send out many Flat Stanleys to all different places so that we would keep getting Flat Stanleys home again and learn more faster!

Some people decorate their own Flat Stanley, perhaps in their likeness, before sending him out. Not us. We adopted an idea I'd read about online, which was to send out just plain white paper dolls and let the host family "dress" him in a way that would reflect their location, or their season, or would be related to something Flat Stanley did while he was there. They could do this with crayons, markers, paints, fabrics, or pretty much anything they want. It allows for more creativity for the recipient, and a fun surprise for us when he comes home and we get to see how he looks!

I chose to use a form letter type thing that the recipients could use; they just have to fill in the blanks, telling us what Stanley saw and did while he was with them, what their climate was like, what other interesting things they would like to tell us about their location, and approximately how many miles Stanley traveled to come visit them. They would then return this to us along with Flat Stanley when they were ready to send him back home.

I started all this yesterday morning. By last night my daughter and I had a whole bunch of Flat Stanleys stuffed into envelopes and ready to go. When I woke up, there were still more addresses waiting.

I'm so pleased with how quickly and how well it has taken off! And I'm so pleased with how enthusiastic the host families are. I have already received descriptions of things Stanley will do during his visit. I have received promises of photos. I have received offers for the host families to take Stanley on vacations with them (a woman from California has offered to take him on an Alaskan cruise with her at the end of the month!!)

Here are the locations we shipped FLAT STANLEY off to this morning:

United States Flat Stanleys

Arkansas
California (this woman will be taking Stanley on the Alaskan cruise!)
Florida
Georgia
Indiana (two different locations)
Maine
Maryland (two different locations)
Nebraska
New Jersey
New York (two different locations)
Ohio (two different locations)
Pennsylvania (two different locations)
Virginia
Washington
Wisconsin

*In addition, I currently have Flat Stanleys addressed and ready to go to Connecticut and an additional New York location on Monday. He will also be going to Vermont tomorrow with my mother and sister. And my sister tells me she will be giving me an address later for a friend of hers in Illinois.

**I also just finished emailing Flat Stanley to another Florida location as that host family is going on vacation to NYC next week and would like to take Stanley with them! Emailing Stanley (and his travel documents) will ensure they receive him on time.

Out Of The Country Flat Stanleys

Australia
Canada
Egypt
Hong Kong
Ireland
Kyrgyzstan

*I also have a Flat Stanley addressed and ready to go to a second location in Canada on Monday, and I have a request pending to send Flat Stanley to a host family in Belgium.

So far it only cost me $13.69 to mail out the Flat Stanleys I mailed today (like 27 of them, with several going out of the country!) Well worth it for the entertainment and educational value we will be getting from this and cheap by today's standards for said entertainment and education :)

Alexa keeps saying she wishes she could go WITH Flat Stanley. So do I! But this will be the next best thing.

We're both very excited to be doing this project and hope that our host family locations continue to expand so that Stanley can visit (and we can learn about) as many places as possible.

I decided that starting a blog on behalf of Flat Stanley would be a fun way to record his travels and adventures as we learn of them, in addition to the scrapbook we will end up keeping. This will be a fun record for Alexa and I, but will also enable all our friends, relatives and acquaintances to see what Stanley is up to. And for those of you who are strangers to us and may be reading this, I hope it inspires you to start a Flat Stanley project of your own. We've just begun and already we are having a blast!

And so, here it is. The Adventures Of Flat Stanley Blog. I hope our readers enjoy it.

Happy Travels, Flat Stanley!

P.S. Here is a picture of Alexa, Flat Stanley's owner:




Want to view a virtual map of the places Flat Stanley has gone off to visit?

http://www.travbuddy.com/widget_map_display.php?id=4215373