The Flat Stanley Project

Whoever came up with this idea for a project is brilliant! Was it the author of the Flat Stanley books? Who knows. Who cares! (I'm just kidding; I read the background page on the site The Flat Stanley Project and know it was a guy named Dale Hubert, not Jeff Brown, the author. But really, who cares?) I loved geography as a kid, so traveling vicariously through a miniature man in an envelope and learning about his adventures appeals to me in an odd sort of way.

This is the first year my school is a museum academy magnet school. We're grant-funded for three years and are required to have three exhibition nights during the school year--two focused on social studies and one on science. Since we decided our first exhibition would focus on social studies and first grade does a unit on Flat Stanley anyway, it was only natural for them to choose the Flat Stanley Project for their first exhibition night back in November. It was a huge success! The kids were thrilled to receive letters and e-mails from China, California, Russia and from up and down the East Coast. Our families were impressed with the scope of Flat Stanley's reach. I think the Flat Stanley Project is an excellent way to sneak in some geography lessons for kids, particularly when the average adult can barely identify the location of our nation's capital on a map (thanks, Jay Leno).

Dale Hubert with Flat Stanley; image credit, www.flatstanley.com

Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures, Book #1; image credit: www.amazon.com