Earlier this year we received an email from my husband’s brother that our nephew had picked his Tio (uncle) for a school project. They said they would be mailing it to us. We did not know what the project was about. A week later Flat Stanley arrived.
What is Flat Stanley? That is the question we asked ourselves, and we found out other friends had also been tasked with the pleasure of a Flat Stanley visit in the past.
Flat Stanley is a school project for elementary students. He goes on “adventures” and comes back with stories and pictures and mementos for his friend (in this case our nephew). The premise on the website is that the Flat Stanley exchange should be between two children; however, as we found out, more teachers ask their students to pick anyone. Anyone turns out to be adult relatives in other states.
So, with less than a week to take Flat Stanley on adventures, we thumbed through the Oregon tourist sites and found a few places. Some of the places we took Flat Stanley were restaurants, historic sites, major company campuses, university locations, fun food places, church, our home, and factories.
We took him to work.
And to volunteering.
He got to see the local attractions.
And he tried food at local restaurants.
Stanley also got to see a church band in action.
We kept all the adventures local.
Then we looked up sample Flat Stanley letters, as we were supposed to write about all Flat Stanley’s adventures. This is where the web fell flat. The Flat Stanley samples that came up were either forms with fields to fill in or very short. They were also very boring! Thus, I took that form and created a full letter using the concepts of fun and educational.
I made sure to write one paragraph for each Flat Stanley adventure. I also made sure to add educational highlights for each adventure. When I needed to reference actual facts, I inserted the citation that the student could use to look up more information.
My husband said the teacher will probably groan when he/she sees the adventure package we shipped back. However, my thought was that if we were asked to do this I wanted to do it well.
Since others will most likely have the pleasure of hosting a Flat Stanley in the future, I wanted to share our Flat Stanley_Sample Letter as a starting point for those just as dumbfounded as we were when we got the Flat Stanley package.
Information in the letter has been changed a bit for security purposes, but the main concepts are still there.
Here’s to better and more interesting Flat Stanley letters for future adventurers! Have fun! If you are lucky to be sent an electronic Flat Stanley, they now have an app for the iPhone and are currently working on one for Android based phones.
