Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Flat Stanley

Have you ever heard of Flat Stanley? Flat Stanley is a book about a flat boy who travels the world by being mailed. It is super cute and relevant to social studies. For my BLOCK class, I created my own Flat Stanley to be mailed to different places. I tried emailing it to a few friends in Scotland, Swaziland in South Africa, and Washington state in the US. However, she only came back from Africa.


A friend of mine's mother works in Swaziland with an orphanage. In this picture are her two children (holding my Flat Stanley and the puppy) and some natives eating fresh mangoes. 

Flat Stanley is a great tool for teaching social studies. Children in your classroom can color their own and mail it to different places you are learning about. Children can write journal prompts about the adventures their flat person has taken in their travels. Math and science can be incorporated in distances and regional differences. And most importantly, Flat Stanley can give an account of the people, life, culture and other traditions from the places he has been. 

I hope you enjoy this great idea for incorporating social studies!



2 comments:

  1. Jenna,
    I also sent my Flat Janet to different states and had so much fun doing it. It gave me a chance to talk to people in those states and find out things going on in their area. If it was not for this assignment I would not have thought to ask different questions about the place they live. I rarely talk to the people in these other states but this was a great reason to talk to them. I would defiantly use flat Stanley in my classroom to encourage interaction between my students and people around the world. I would give them 3 to 5 questions to ask and would have the student make up 2 questions of their own so we could later discuss them in class.

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  2. Adorable picture!!!
    This is great to do in a classroom, anytime!

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